Abortion Is Repression

The Supreme Court, that august and dignified body, is sexually repressed. Except maybe for Justice Douglass, who was a randy old goat. You know they're sexually repressed because when they write about oral or anal sex they always use the word "sodomy". What else are they going to say? "Oh yeah, that's the unenumerated right to lick pussy." It would seem like an odd opinion to write. "We're overruling that statute based on the anal sex clause of the 14th Amendment." Cause, let's face it, our wig-wearing Founders were way too uptight to put a sodomy clause in our Constitution. I hear Ben Franklin was in favor of it, but they shouted him down.

Now, just because some people are uptight and proper in public, does not mean they're not wild and crazy in their private bedrooms. On the other hand, it might mean they're uptight all the time. Maybe they think sex is bad and unpleasant. It's that nasty thing we don't want to talk about. 

Maybe that's why Supreme Court Justices like abortion so much. Abortion saves you from that awful sex thing you did. You get to go to a clean doctor's office, and "take care of it."

How many people have abortions because they can't handle the stigma of fornication? Oh my God, you're a single mom. Fornicator! Pregnancy is like a giant scarlet letter that fornicators have to wear for nine months. Well, the girl fornicators, the boy fornicators have deniability. "Still a virgin, I didn't do it." You had sex with somebody, you pregnant person. You know you did.

If abortion is so right, why do we treat it like a bad secret? The Supreme Court keeps repeating how right it is, and what do we do? Hide, hide, hide. Get rid of the body. Bury it, bury it. Oh it's repression, all right. It's repression, suppression, oppression. From that love-making session. I'm on a Johnny Cochran roll. You need some confession. About your obsession.

1.3 million abortions a year, and what do we say about it? Nothing. Keep it quiet. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

"Personal Dignity and Autonomy"

"Our precedents have respected the private realm of family life which the state cannot enter," the Supreme Court writes in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Court goes on to argue that these matters, "involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment."

Autonomous arguments are all about independence.  "I rule myself and nobody tells me what to do."  I agree that autonomy is central to abortion arguments.  Autonomy is an ancient Greek word.  Of course, those ancient Greeks practiced infanticide. Killing a baby was justified, they said, because babies are not independent. They are helpless beings, beneath us, we who rule ourselves. And this autonomy word sums up the Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence quite nicely: you are autonomous, baby is not autonomous; you are viable, baby is not viable; you are independent, baby is dependent; you are human, baby is sub-human. And we need not resolve whether she's alive or not.

The dignity argument, on the other hand, is ridiculous. You know I'm a big fan of birth control. Love the birth control. But what's dignified about it? I think putting a condom on is maybe one of the least dignified things I've ever done.

And what's dignified about strapping in and having a doctor poking around in your vagina?

We can say dignified things about sex and reproduction--that's what marriage is, an attempt to dignify sex and reproduction--but what we're actually doing is trying to dignify something that animals do. It's why porn is a low status occupation. It's why shitting on a toilet is not considered man at his best. There's nothing dignified about sex, the beast with two backs. It's fun, sure, but it's not dignified. The more you talk about sex, the less dignified you are.

Who cares about dignity? The damn Supreme Court, that's who. They got dignity up the ass. It's why they wear those sexless black robes. They want to hide their sex because sex is animal and if you're an animal you're not really dignified, are you?

If you want dignity, have a marriage ceremony. Have some rabbi sanctify your union. That's dignified. A baby dignifies sex. Love dignifies sex. Marriage dignifies sex. But there's nothing really dignified about a 69, or a sex doll. Is there? If sodomy is dignified then the Supreme Court should suck my cock, right?

I say this whole conversation is undignified. When a Supreme Court Justice is running around in his robes with a massive boner, is he dignified or embarassed? You tell me. I know, I know, that never happens. They are too dignified for that to happen.  If you speak for Justice, you have a tiny phallus.  If you have a phallus at all!

I'm sorry, sex is not dignified.  Oh it's fun.  That's what makes it fun, it's sloppy animal time.  It's just not dignifed.  

I say, if you don't have love in your heart, and you don't know what a person is, and you can't get birth control to work, what the hell do you have to be dignified about? You hairless ape.

The Commie Analogy

The Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence reminds me of Karl Marx. Not because of any economic theory (if anything, it's laissez-faire). It's the use of ideology and rhetoric that reminds me of Marx. The Orwellian use of language to hide what is really going on, which is to say, homicides.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Anthony Kennedy co-writes an opinion that uses high-blown rhetoric. "Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt." He claims that abortion is part of "the private realm of family life which the state cannot enter." And he says at "the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

According to this, abortion is a happy event. It's meaningful and mysterious, philosophical, even. You're not flushing an embryo in a toilet. You're soaring in the clouds! It's this kind of babble that makes Communism appeal to a certain type of mind. They skip over the censorship, the dictatorship, the shooting in the back of the head, the shutting off the borders so nobody can flee. It's equality!

Now compare the happy rhetoric of Casey with the brutal language in Carhart. Justice Kennedy writes, "The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: it bleeds to death as it is torn from limb to limb." This language seems like it's coming from a critic of abortion. It's like Ronald Reagan talking about an evil empire. It's kinda bizarre that the guy who co-wrote Casey is the same guy who would go on to dissent in Carhart and write Carhart II.

If we are analogizing abortion to Communism, then of course Roe v. Wade is The Communist Manifesto. It's the blueprint, the basis of the ideology. Upon reading Roe, you see that our analogy starts to falter. Harry Blackmun went to great pains in Roe to avoid any high flown rhetoric about the rights of women. He was not actually impartial, or fair, but at least he tried to sound like it. (His later opinions were far more partisan). However, Roe v. Wade, despite the lack of feminist rhetoric in the opinion itself, is nonetheless the basis and the heart of an ideology. It is the abortion bible, a sacred object that cannot be overruled, for if it is overruled, all of womenkind will chained.

If Roe reminds me of Marx, it is because so many people passionately worship the opinion, and form an ideology around it. In both cases this adoration comes from people on the left, and in both cases it swirls around the idea of equality. Marx was obsessed with class and inequalities. Feminists are obsessed with gender and inequalities.

It seems to many people who do not share these obsessions that these leftists do not actually care about people dying. Or rather, they are willing to overlook it. The ideology is so important that the brutal facts are dismissed, ignored, overlooked.

Thus if Roe and its progeny are like the The Communist Manifesto, then an analogy for Carhart is that it's rather like The Black Book of Communism. It is an accounting of death and killing done in the name of an ideology. The authors of The Black Book are French intellectuals and former Communists. So in that sense, they are similar to Anthony Kennedy. He signed on to Casey and affirmed Roe. He's a believer. But he has seen the error of his ways. He acknowledges, honestly and forthrightly, that babies have died as a result of Roe v. Wade.

"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, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he's going to fall. The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby's brains out."

Yet we see that this analogy too is inapt. After all, Justice Kennedy still affirms Roe to this day. Anthony Kennedy, despite his open and honest discussion of infanticide in both of his Carhart opinions, has not actually abandoned the cause. The failure to repudiate Roe makes Kennedy's outrage seem hollow. It strikes me, reading Kennedy's work, that he more closely resembles some American leftist who is unhappy about Stalin shooting people in the back of the head. Kennedy is like a Trotskyite. Communism is right, Communism is wonderful. It's that damn baby-killing Stalin that's the problem.

Continuing our analogy, Dr. Carhart himself might be Stalin. Kennedy goes after him with a bat. "Dr. Leroy Carhart (is) a physician who received his medical degree from Hahnemann Hospital and University in 1973." Now you're going after his school! "Dr. Carhart has no specialty certifications in a field related to childbirth or abortion and lacks admitting privileges at any hospital. He performs abortions throughout pregnancy, including when he is unsure whether the fetus is viable." Yeah yeah, it's Carhart's fault. Don't blame us. After all, we went to the Ivy League.

Kennedy writes, "The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while it's limbs are being torn off. Dr. Carhart has observed fetal heartbeat via ultrasound with extensive parts of the fetus removed. (He) testified that mere dismemberment of a limb does not always cause death because he knows of a physician who removed the arm of a fetus only to have the fetus go on to be born as a living child with one arm. At the conclusion of a D&E abortion no intact fetus remains. In Dr. Carhart's words, the abortionist is left with 'a tray full of pieces'."

So Carhart is Stalin. He's probably more hands on than Stalin, but Kennedy is definitely appalled. So it's pretty startling when you realize that Kennedy, Anthony Kennedy, Justice Anthony Kennedy, from Harvard, is the fifth vote for the procedure described above. You did it, dumb ass. This is your work.

Carhart allowed states to outlaw the D&X procedure, but not the D&E procedure described above. D&E remains a constitutional right, as decided by him, Justice Kennedy, and four other Ivy Leaguers. As Kennedy writes elsewhere, "The State's constitutional authority is a vital means for citizens to address these grave and serious issues, as they must if we are to progress in knowledge and understanding and in the attainment of some degree of consensus."

Well, take your time, buddy. No hurry. Progress! Onward! See you in twenty years!

Justice Ginsburg, Happy Feminist

"Women, it is now acknowledged, have the talent, capacity, and right to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation."

Now that's a pretty good line, if you're giving the commencement address at Wellesley. It's not so impressive in a partial-birth abortion opinion. An abortion opinion means some talented woman, and I acknowledge her talent, participated equally with some equally talented man, and the two equally talented people got drunk and screwed.

How talented do you have to be to have sex and not use birth control? I think a Cro-Magnon couple could handle that one. Oog and Oola. Dogs can have sex without using birth control. I just don't understand how partial-birth abortion could send Justice Ginsburg into spasms of feminist delight.

"Ruth, Ruth, I'm pregnant. What should I do?"

"You participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation!"

Ruth, like a lot of liberals, would much rather spout her happy choice-equality-freedom rhetoric instead of dealing with the reality of abortion. The reality of abortion is that he doesn't love you, you don't love him, and neither of you love the kid you created. That ain't nothing to cheer about. If the Beatles were singing that song they wouldn't know where to start. "All you need is abortion. Abortion. All you need is abortion. Abortion." That's just a sad song, man.

I imagine most people who have an abortion feel guilt. Or betrayed. Or just bad, they feel bad. They feel like they don't have love in their hearts and they did a bad thing. Or maybe they feel nothing. Maybe our Supreme Court has created a bunch of sport-fucking nihilists who don't feel anything about what they do. But what pregnant woman goes into an abortion clinic singing about sisterhood and the emancipation of women?

I swear, Ginsburg must put a tape recorder under pillow at night. "Equality, equality, equality." She's on message all the time, got the equality loop running in her brain. All the normal people are unhappy about their abortions. Most people just don't want to talk about it at all. Ruth is overjoyed about abortion. She's so proud. Men don't have babies, and now you're not having a baby, too. It's equality!

You know what? Your choice sucks, Ruth. It's a horrible choice. Choice number one: give birth to a child you don't want and is going to ruin your life. Or choice number two: abort it and feel guilt for the rest of your life about the life you extinguished. Awesome. I can see why you're so giddy with happiness.

Just throwing this out there, but is it possible that a society ruled by Roe v. Wade forces more and more women to make this horrible, horrible choice that really sucks ass, and nobody wants to make it? I just don't think you should be bragging, Ruthie.

Do Liberals Like Abortion?

Or do they think it's a bad thing that ought to be avoided if at all possible? To me, abortion is the aftermath of an accident. You didn't mean to get pregnant, but you did. Your birth control failed. I wouldn't brag about that. You ought to put a warning sticker on your forehead. "I Am a Birth Control Incompetent." I don't know about you, but I'd be a little embarrassed. You're waving a sign and marching? Abortion is for people who can't get a condom to work.

1.3 million abortions a year. That's a lot of birth control failure. A lot of people are failing, failing, failing. Did you study for the test?

It's drunk screwing is what it is. We drink alcohol and have sex. And we drink so much alcohol that we skip the birth control. What percentage of that 1.3 million abortions a year do you figure are due to drunk screwing?

Whenever I don't use birth control, I'm drunk. And she's drunk, too. We're both drunk. And I ask, "Are we okay on the birth control?" And she says, "Yeah." What am I going to do, ask the U.N. to investigate? Sounds good to me. But drunk people are notoriously bad at doing even simple tasks, like driving a car or practicing safe sex.
 

Drinking, screwing, driving. You should never do two of those things at once. Jimmy Buffett asks, "Why don't we get drunk and screw?" Because you'll forget the damn birth control, that's why. Plus you don't even like each other. That's why you need to get drunk to screw. Why do you need alcohol to lubricate? Ask yourself that. Sing that song.

I think sex ed ought to be like driver's ed. They ought to show you films of mangled bodies. Scare the crap out of the kids. This is what happens when you drink and drive. And this is what happens when you drink and screw. Mangled bodies! Baby's arm is ripped off! It's horrible. Abortion is like a car wreck. It's an accident you want to avoid.

Our Brain Death Standard

What's nice about our brain death standard is that it was created to save lives. In 1973 (ironically, the same year as Roe v. Wade), a man named Andrew Lyons shot and killed a man. And his victim died in the hospital. The doctors tried to save him, but they couldn't. He was brain dead. But his heart was still beating. It turns out your heart has its own little motor independent of the brain. When you die, and have no brain activity at all, your heart's still going, at least for a couple of days. That's kind of freaky, right?

Anyway, these doctors talked to the victim's family. They explained that he was brain dead, and asked if they could transplant his still beating heart into somebody who needed a new heart. And the family said okay. Good for them.

At the time, California had a death statute that defined death as loss of heart and lung function. So Lyons' attorneys made this really evil argument that Lyons didn't kill anybody. He just shot the guy and killed his brain. The doctors actually finished him off when they took out his heart. So the judge squashed that argument by rewriting the law and saying total brain death was the standard of death in California. You know the attorneys were like, "You can't do that shit." And judge was like, "Overruled."

So right after this case the legislature said, "Yeah yeah, total brain death is the standard of death in California." And it was quickly adopted by all the rest of the states too. And the Pope signed on as well.

All of us like total brain death because you really are dead--once you got zero activity in the brain, man, forget it--but your heart's beating for a couple of days, circulating blood to all your organs, enough time to save a lot of lives. That's cool.

It's a little controversial, I guess. You don't want the doctors saying you're dead just cause they want your organs so bad. You'd be like, "Dude, I'm right here. I'm talking to you. You can't have my heart. I need it." You don't want to be a coma guy and have them jump the gun on you.

Of course, total brain death was not created with abortion in mind. As far as I'm concerned, that's a plus for the rule. It's not biased or politicized, it's not trying to win the abortion debate. It's a good rule, I think, plus it's handy for organ transplants. So you can actually save somebody's life after you kick off. That's nice, right?

Abortion vs. Birth Control

In Carhart II, Justice Ginsburg writes, "Women, it is now acknowledged, have the talent, capacity, and right to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation. Their ability to realize their full potential, the Court recognized, is intimately connected to their ability to control their reproductive lives."

Okay. Can I just point out that Carhart II is not a case about birth control? If we were litigating Griswold all over again, I could see you making the argument for a woman's ability to control whether she is going to get pregnant or not. Because Griswold would be the birth control opinion. As it stands, with birth control freely available at any drug store, all of us do indeed have the ability to control our reproductive lives. I don't know if it's necessary in each and every abortion opinion for the liberal Justices to write as if those damn Republicans are about to deny our right to birth control.

It's rhetoric, okay. I know we all use rhetoric. But is abortion actually our ability to control our reproductive lives? Or is it more honest to say that abortion is something we do when we have failed to live up to our ability to control our reproductive lives? If you say, "hey, I'm not using any birth control," okay. You are choosing not to control your reproductive life.

Later on, you might say, "I want to control it! I want to control it!" But that sperm is out of the bag. So to speak.

I know, you had an accident. It happens. All right. People have accidents. I just wish the signs were, "I have a right to clean up my mess when I fuck up my birth control." I know that's not as persuasive a sign. Just more honest, maybe.

"Are we okay on the birth control?"

"Oh yeah, don't worry about it. I'll just have an abortion. No biggie."

I'm just not sure abortion fits comfortably under the birth control umbrella. Flushing my sperm-filled condom down the toilet, that would be birth control. Inducing labor and delivering a retarded infant and ripping him into pieces, that would be abortion.

"Hey, not every abortion involves inducing labor and delivering a retarded infant, you know. A lot of early abortions are simple and easy to do. For instance, the RU-486 is a pill that you can take. That's really simple."

Okay. Good point. Way to keep me on my toes. Not every abortion is the same. Abortion becomes more morally problematic as we go through the pregnancy. Aborting an embryo is less bothersome to a lot of people than injecting poison into a retarded kid's neck. So I'll watch my rhetoric. Not every abortion is a homicide. I'm pretty sure I said that already, but I'll say it again. Right-wingers, you can't just call something a homicide just because it makes you mad. You have to have some objective basis for saying it's a homicide.

That's why I like death statutes. Pay attention to the death statutes, liberals. You know, the ones we apply to us.

The Photo

I saw this reenacted on an episode of House. Pretty amazing.

Saving Preemies

In Planned Parenthood v. Danforth, Missouri had the following statute: "Any physician or person assisting in the abortion who shall fail to take such measures to encourage or to sustain the life of the child, and the death of the child results, shall be deemed guilty of manslaughter."

This is 1976, just a few years after Roe, and it gives the Court the opportunity to really enforce the viability doctrine. What would it be like if you enforced this statute? The doctor would have to make best efforts to keep the baby alive. He could remove the baby and put her in an incubator. If the baby died, okay, as long as the doctor was making good faith efforts to save her life.

Yet the Supreme Court objected to this statute, on the grounds that it does not distinguish viable from non-viable infants. The Court said this is impermissible under Roe. Well, how do you know who is viable, who can survive, if doctors do not actually try to keep the baby alive?

According to the Court, medical doctors are certain that a baby at week 24 would not survive in an incubator. And yet people surprise us all the time. Is it not good medical ethics to wait for somebody to die before you start ripping their body apart?

As the partial-birth abortion opinions make clear, the doctors in these cases make no attempt to keep any of these babies alive. Well, why not? I mean, the D&X abortion procedure involves taking the baby out of the womb anyway. By doing so, the pregnancy is terminated. It's over. It's aborted. The woman is free of her unborn child. So, if you are a doctor who swears an Oath to keep people alive, why would you not make an effort to keep that baby alive?

You don't actually have to kill the kid. Since abortionists can and do remove babies from the womb, why not have a doctor--a real doctor, with medical skill, who's practice involves saving lives rather than destroying them--why not have a doctor actually make the attempt to transfer the baby to an incubator? Is this so unthinkable?

Viability is a hypothetical scenario, describing the baby's "potential" for survival. But of course a baby's survival depends heavily on the attitudes of the people in the room who surround her. Blackmun's technical definition of viability requires that the people in the room actually want the baby to survive, and that they have the equipment to help her. But where in all the Supreme Court caselaw is the abortionist who wants the baby to survive?

Even if you have a nice guy abortionist, who realizes that the baby is viable, what's he going to do? He's got a preemie without an incubator. I guess he wraps him in a blankie. Do abortionists have blankies?

It's almost as if Supreme Court caselaw is designed for unwanted babies to die.

Keeping Abortion Cheap

In 1978, Ohio passed a law that an abortion after the first trimester must take place in a hospital. Makes sense, right? Where are the incubators? In a hospital. And, as we all know from reading our partial-birth abortion caselaw, second and third trimester abortions can be kind of messy. A hospital is a good place for invasive medical procedures. You protect the woman's health, and if it turns out the baby is bigger than you thought, you can put him in an incubator. So it's a win-win, right?

In Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional. The Court is overturning a health regulation that protects women and babies. Why?

"A primary burden created by the requirement is additional costs to the woman. The Court of Appeals noted that there was testimony that a second-trimester abortion costs nearly twice as much in a hospital as in a clinic." The Court goes on to note that a hospital abortion costs $900, while a D&E in a clinic costs $350-$400.

Now, it is true, safety regulations cost money. I am well aware of the cost burdens of the liberal welfare state. I mean, women should be free to contract, right? Some women want safer abortions in a hospital--just in case they are bleeding or they have that free-floating head problem. So they pay an extra $500 for safety. Other women don't mind risking their lives, so they can get cheap, not-as-safe abortions, with the ol' slice-and-dice method in the clinic. Lochner, Lochner, right to contract, woo-hoo!

What F.D.R. and the New Deal democrats would say, I think, is that this Supreme Court has obviously lost its mind, its rules are illegitimate, you are feeble-minded idiots, and we need to pack the fucking Court. Okay, they would probably be more polite. What happened to liberalism, man? What happened to feminism? Do you not actually give a damn about a woman's health anymore?

A woman going into a clinic has no idea of the health risks involved. She is counting on the procedure being safe. She cannot bargain effectively. This is the basis for state regulation of all industry, you Supreme Court shit-for-brains. Yeah yeah, abortion is an industry, and it needs safety regulations from the welfare state. And, since Lochner was overruled and disgraced like 70 years ago, I shouldn't have to jump up and down and tell you this. You're fucking liberals! This is your side, man! Do you want women to die?

Just go through the Ginsburg list of all the life-threatening injuries that can happen to a woman who undergoes a D&E, and then consider that the Supreme Court has insisted, for twenty-seven years, that a hospital requirement--a simple fucking safety regulation--for this invasive medical procedure is unconstitutional. Unconstitutional! She's unconscious and you're ripping into her body with a knife. Hacking and removing, hacking and removing. I kinda think a hospital would be a good place for that. I mean, am I insane? Have I lost my mind? Have I misunderstood the purpose of a hospital?

Why not do away with that bothersome M.D. requirement and let plumbers have a crack at it? I bet we could deregulate our way down to $90 abortions.

How many women died as a result of this case? All those girls with the bottom-of-the-medical-class perforating their uterus, I kinda think those girls wish they had been in a hospital. 4-7 million dead Carhart babies, could have saved some of those. Tossed 'em in an incubator. The Supreme Court is acting like some fucking bureaucrat in a corporation making a cost-benefit analysis. You're trying to save $500? Holy shit!

As bad as Lochner was, I doubt anybody died as a result of it. I mean, if the nanny state can pass safety regulations keeping bakers from working 11 hours in a day, it seems to me that it can pass safety regulations protecting 16-year-old girls from blood loss and uterine trauma. What are the bakers worried about, hot fingers? You brought back Lochner, you clods. You morons.

Correct me if I'm wrong but the whole point of legalizing abortions was to make them safer for women. And now you are removing safety protections for women? And you say with a straight face that the Constitution requires this? Why must abortions be cheap, plentiful, and life-threatening as possible?

Simopoulos v. Virginia

In Simopoulos v. Virginia, an abortionist goes to jail. Yes! I couldn't believe it, either.

"P.M. was a 17-year-old high school student when she went to appellant's clinic on November 8, 1979. She was unmarried, and told appellant that she was approximately 22 weeks pregnant. She requested an abortion and didn't want her parents to know. Examination by appellant confirmed that P.M. was five months pregnant..."

"Two days later, P.M. returned to the clinic with her boyfriend. The abortion was performed by an injection of a saline solution. P.M. told appellant that she planned to deliver the fetus in a motel, and understood him to agree to this course."

"P.M. went to a motel. Alone, she aborted her fetus in the motel bathroom 48 hours after the saline injection. She left the fetus, follow-up instructions, and pain medication in the wastebasket at this motel. Her boyfriend drove her home. Police found the fetus later that day and began an investigation."

"Appellant was indicted for unlawfully performing an abortion during the second trimester of pregnancy outside of a licensed hospital and was convicted..."

Yeah yeah, got him with the hospital requirement. Apparently finishing off your abortion in a motel room was a bit too deregulatory for the Supreme Court to handle. I don't know why, but some people do not like finding a dead baby in a trash can. It freaks them out.

Now it's true, when I leave used condoms in a trash can, people don't like that, either. "Ewww, gross. Condoms." Imagine falling into a vat of used condoms. Sick, right? What a nightmare. But even the most repressed Victorian doesn't calls the cops when she runs across a used prophylactic. "Wet condom! Spermies! Emergency!" Call the cops on used birth control, you're probably gonna get arrested for making a false 911 call, right? That's not my bad, that's your bad. You got OCD. I mean, who makes that call? Even in Connecticut in 1964, you got to figure nobody's making that call.

Dead baby, on the other hand? See one fetus in a trash can, all that high-falutin' Constitutional rights talk goes out the window. That maid was seriously unhappy. Probably she was some pro-life Catholic from Guatemala, right? Shocked to find a little baby cadaver in the rubbish. Hey, you got to expect that. You're not in Guatemala anymore. Welcome to America.

This is how we might be able to distinguish Griswold from Roe. People don't freak out about other people's birth control. Might be a little gross. But we wash our hands and we're good. But when you dump one tiny baby in a trash can, suddenly you've got four police cars and yellow tape over the scene. I don't know, Supreme Court. Looks like your constitutional right was a homicide investigation. Just sayin'.

You got to figure P.M was a little smarter than the Prom Mom. Although they both disposed of their babies in trash cans. Girls, come on. Use a little imagination. Did you try the toilet? Watch Rear Window for suggestions on body disposal.

Probably P.M. wasn't trying to hide anything. "Hey, I'm exercising my constitutional right to choose. Don't tell my parents." Anyway, the Prom Mom got 15 years. (Or 3 if you ask the parole board). In this case, on the other hand, we say P.M. is the victim.

No word on what happened to that dead baby, who doesn't even get initials. I guess they took him out of that trash can.

Roe v. Wade is a Really Stupid Statute

After noting that everybody feels very strongly about abortion, and our opinions are all over the place, and nobody agrees, Harry and six of his cohorts write a statute and impose it on the country. That's bad. But what's really bad is the statute itself. You won't believe how dumb it is. Here's how it starts. "With respect to the State's important and legitimate interest in the health of the mother, the 'compelling point,' in light of present medical knowledge, is at approximately the end of the first trimester."

Right away we see that this is a horrible statute. It's not just a bad interpretation of the Constitution. Everybody knows Blackmun is not actually reading the Constitution. It's a bad statute. If Harry Blackmun is in the statute-writing business--and he's not--he should be fired. Because that's a horrible statute.

Why is it bad? Okay, read it again. In regard to the health of the mother, the compelling point when the state can regulate an abortion is "approximately the end of the first trimester." You got that? Forget the baby or the squid or whatever you want to call her. He's not talking about the unborn. He's talking about the woman. According to Roe, a State has no interest in protecting a pregnant woman in the first three months of the pregnancy.

I don't care what kind of Ivy League scholar you are, you got to be a frickin' idiot to sign on to that. An abortion is an invasive medical procedure. There was no RU-486 in 1973. No pill you could take. You can't just assume it's safe and that nobody could die from an abortion. In 1973, an abortion meant that somebody was cutting into you with a knife. And you really want that somebody to be a doctor.

Blackmun writes that an abortion in the first trimester is "an abortion free of interference by the state." You got that? However you want to do it. You want to have an abortion in a barn, go ahead. The state can't interfere. You want to have some auto mechanic do an abortion in a hotel room? That's up to you. The state can't interfere. The state has no interest in protecting a woman's health in the first trimester. Abortion is so simple and easy and safe, the state has no business sticking its nose in at all. Unless it's the second trimester, then it gets more complicated. But for the first three months, it's the wild west of abortion.

Blackmun writes, "This is so because of the now-established medical fact...that, until the end of the first trimester mortality in abortion may be less than mortality in normal childbirth." Yeah yeah, it was really stupid getting pregnant, cause now you might die. But we the Supreme Court have come up with an improvement. Abortion! It's way safer than giving birth. It's so safe, there can be no state regulations at all in the first trimester. So abort away! Chances are, you'll be saving your own life.

Listen, the state regulates dentists, okay? The state regulates veterinarians. All doctors except abortionists have state regulations up the ass. According to Roe v. Wade, an abortion doctor has a wild, three-month party. It's anarchy in the first trimester. Get drunk! The state has no interest in protecting the woman's health. The Supreme Court decrees that abortion is always safer--no, wait, "may be" safer--then giving birth.

All of medicine is regulated by the state. It's the state that requires doctors to go to medical school and be certified by authorities. You're not allowed to call yourself doctor otherwise. The state regulates all medical procedures for your health. And these unelected morons in 1973 strip the states of all authority to regulate abortion in the first three months of the pregnancy. There are not words to describe how stupid this is. I mean, there's just widespread agreement in our society that non-doctors should not be carving into pregnant women.

After the first trimester is over, everything goes back to normal. States can go back to regulating this medical procedure like any other medical procedure. "It follows that, from and after this point, a State may regulate the abortion procedure to the extent that the regulation reasonable relates to the preservation and protection of maternal health." You got that? It's the second trimester, and this is serious.

Harry outlines for us what sort of regulations a state might do to protect women from the knife. "Examples of permissible state regulation in this area are requirements as to the qualifications of the person who is to perform the abortion; as to the licensure of that person; as to the facility in which the procedure is to be performed, that is, whether it must be a hospital or may be a clinic or some other place of less-than-hospital status, as to the licensing of the facility, and the like."

All of this sounds really good to me. Harry has successfully identified some state concerns in regard to the woman's health. You want a qualified physician. You want him to be licensed. You want a qualified facility, and you want that to be licensed. The problem is not with Harry's list of health concerns. The problem is that Harry thinks the State has no interest in having these regulations in the first trimester. I'm sorry, I'm going to call him a dumb fuck again. Oh my God, that is so stupid.

I know, you think I'm exaggerating. You think I'm making this up. Of course you do, because this is so frickin' insane, the Supreme Court could never write it. But they did. That's the problem with writing your opinions out for everyone to read. All your wrong, stupid shit comes back to haunt you. Roe v. Wade is published. You can't rewrite it to make it look smarter. It is what it is.

The Supreme Court had to fix this stupidity in their very next abortion case. Oh, they were embarrassed. Oh, they were mortified. Oh sure, they pretended like they hadn't written those sentences. But they did.

You probably haven't heard of Connecticut v. Menillo. The Supreme Court is very glad that you haven't heard of Connecticut v. Menillo. I will quote from it. "In 1971, a jury convicted Patrick Menillo of attempting to procure an abortion in violation of Connecticut's criminal abortion statute. Menillo is not a physician, and has never had any medical training." Oops.

According to Roe v. Wade, a first trimester abortion is so safe that the State cannot regulate it, even for the woman's health. As we recall, "requirements as to the qualifications of the person who is to perform the abortion" have to wait for the second trimester. That's when you can regulate for the woman's health. As long as Mr. Menillo, non-physician, is doing first trimester abortions, he is definitely doing something that is safer than giving birth. And any abortion in the first trimester is "free of interference from the state."

So the authorities in Connecticut look at each other, shrug, and start releasing all those non-physician abortionists out of prison. They're releasing the drunks, the med school dropouts, all those people who feel confident enough to terminate a pregnancy but haven't actually been licensed by anybody to practice medicine. You're free to go.

Just imagine you're Connnecticut. You've got some morons up above you who have just dictated an insane frickin' rule. You can either follow them off the cliff of insanity, or you can say, fuck it. I'm rewriting Roe v. Wade because it's too stupid to be law. Those are your options. And people are sitting in jail, demanding to be released, based on the laws as written by Justice Blackmun and the Supreme Court. Are you going to follow this stupid law? Or are you going to lie and try to cover up for your moron boss?

Connecticut decides to follow Roe v. Wade. Minnesota decides to follow Roe v. Wade. Pennsylvania decides to follow Roe v. Wade. Michigan and New Jersey, on the other hand, refuse to release all those non-doctors who are doing abortions. Yeah yeah, we know what Roe v. Wade says. But we're going to ignore it and keep you in jail. Because cutting people up is a dangerous occupation, and we think it can be regulated by the state. Regardless of what Roe v. Wade says.

The problem with ideology is that reality will bite you in the ass. I mean, it sounds really cool to say abortion should be "free of interference from the state." No doubt Harry is thinking of nice, sweet, feminist abortions, by Harvard-trained physicians, on a nice cloud somewhere. He's probably not thinking of alcoholic doctors who have had their licenses stripped from them and are doing abortions in a trailer park.

In Connecticut v. Menillo, as the Supreme Court desperately covers up its shit and pretends like Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota just can't read, the Court says of course you can convict non-doctors for doing abortions in the first trimester. Because, you know, women might die. And the Supreme Court loves women. Unborn babies, not so much, but the Court definitely loves women.

There's really not an interest group big enough to support an unenumerated right for a drunk, non-licensed physician to cut open a pregnant woman and her baby. There ain't no feminists who will carry that sign.

It's kind of funny that no Supreme Court Justice will sign this opinion. Writing anonymously, the Court notes that "Jane Roe had sought to have an abortion performed by a competent, licensed physician, under safe, clinical conditions." Yeah, it's almost like a state needs to be able to require those things. There are a lot of reasons a Court might issue a per curiam opinion. In this case, I think it's acute embarrassment.

Narrowing Roe v. Wade

One way the Supreme Court might have avoided this debacle is by narrowing the issue a bit. For instance, in Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court might have found an unenumerated right to abort in cases of rape. See how that plays out. See how many people start screaming about that one. The woman suing in Roe v. Wade claimed that she had been raped. She was lying her ass off, but the Justices didn't know that at the time. They could have focused on the rape issue.

Texas did not allow abortion in rape cases. On the other hand, Texas argued that pregnancy began at implantation, not conception. Implantation of the ovum in the uteran wall happens 7-9 days after conception. So a woman who was raped in Texas would have a week to go to a hospital and get cleaned up and make sure she didn't become pregnant. Texas did not specify that rape victims could have an abortion, but defined their law in such a way ("pregnancy begins at implantation") that actual rape victims had at least a week to stop any pregnancy.

Consider too that some forms of birth control--constitutionally protected under Griswold v. Connecticut--might in fact be abortions. The I.U.D. works by keeping an ovum from attaching to the uterus.

To many pro-lifers, who say that pregnancy begins at conception, that's an abortion. Many other people consider the I.U.D. not to be an abortion at all, but an ordinary form of birth control. They are shocked to hear that an I.U.D. is abortion. And they don't believe it.

My own opinion is that the I.U.D. is far more similar to Griswold than, say, all the free-floating baby heads described in Carhart. I kinda classify the I.U.D. along with the pill and the condom. Maybe I'm wrong but that's where I put it.

A cautious abortion opinion, then, would focus on the rape issue, would talk about Texas' argument that pregnancy begins at implantation, would debate whether I.U.D. is abortion or birth control, would question whether a week is enough time for a rape victim to go to a hospital and get cleaned up. The Texas rule, allowing for abortions for one week after conception, does not specify rape victims. But of course they are the ones most likely to take advantage of the rule. And people who use an I.U.D. for birth control can do so in Texas. I don't even think it would be particularly controversial to find that the I.U.D. falls under Griswold, or that rape victims have a right to stop a pregnancy.

If the Supreme Court had written a narrow opinion, making these comparisons, drawing these arguments out, Roe v. Wade would have been just an ordinary case. And it would give people time to reflect and think about it and criticize, if they felt strongly about it.

Instead the Court wrote very absolute rules in regard to abortion, and dictated those rules to all the people in our country. As a result, we are killing 6-pound babies. We're way beyond birth control. We're way beyond any opinion that's going to resolve this case and make it go away. 

If you're going to be jurisprudential, you really need some sort of constitutional text to support anything that makes people mad. If you're going off-book and free bird, your opinion better be damn popular. If you're going off-book and free bird and writing an opinion that you know half the country is going to find "cold, callous...and horrifying," you pretty much screwed the pooch.

One thing you clearly did not do was resolve the case or controversy. And that's your job description, damn it. If you morons start another civil war, we're going to be pissed.

Treating the Unborn As One of Us

I am not saying that total brain death is my awesome rule, by the way. Don't want to commit the Harry Blackmun error. I don't want to be an asshole insisting everybody has to follow my rule. The nice thing about total brain death is that it's not my rule. It's everybody's rule. It's the rule in all 50 states, and Washington D.C., and every industrial nation in the world. Except in Japan. I don't know how they die in Japan. You say you don't like this rule? Change the damn rule. You can do that. You can totally change your death rules.

On the other hand, you can't play fast and loose with your death statutes. "Once you have white hair, you're dead." Just spitballing here, but I would call that unconstitutional. But I think--since we apply death statutes to us, and none of us want to be buried alive--that we tend to be pretty good about our death statutes. The problem is not with our definitions of death. The problem is that the Supreme Court has defined the unborn as outside the class of humanity.

I say that's bad. And unconstitutional.

What is tragic about the Court's failure to apply the equal protection clause to the unborn is that it would have helped them navigate some of these tricky waters. If the unborn are a protected class of people, if they are a part of humanity, doctors can't just kill them. But then you have to think about what is a homicide and what is not.

Say the Court in Roe struck down the Texas abortion statute as unconstitutional. But instead of writing a new abortion statute for the whole country, the Court did nothing. That would leave doctors free to do abortions, right? Not necessarily. Texas could still have charged a doctor with homicide. Some of these abortions that we read about in Supreme Court caselaw rather seem like a homicide, right?

In fact, it is this possibility, that abortion might be a homicide, that makes it troubling to separate this procedure from homicide classifications, from death statutes, from the laws we apply to the rest of us. From the statute, and the State's defense of the statute at oral argument in Roe, it isn’t clear whether Texas considers abortion to be infanticide (since it defines life as beginning at implantation) or not infanticide (since abortion has a separate section in the criminal code). Does the abortion statute preclude a murder prosecution? Is the abortionist guilty of abortion, or murder? This murkiness in the law creates a notice issue with the citizenry, hence a due process issue.

So one thing the Supreme Court could have done is void the statute for vagueness. Why is there a separate section for abortion in the criminal code? In Roe, Justice Blackmun writes, "the penalty for criminal abortion specified by Art. 1195 (10 years) is significantly less than the maximum penalty for murder prescribed by Art. 1257 of the Texas Penal Code (death penalty). If the fetus is a person, may the penalties be different?"

The answer, of course, is no. But the Supreme Court is glib and facile in assuming that discrimination against the unborn "proves" that babies in the womb are not alive and not people. Just because Texas is discriminating against the unborn does not mean that the Supreme Court should constitutionalize that discrimination. "The unborn are not people, we have proven it."

A far more subtle opinion might have voided the statute for vagueness, and asked the state to bring its abortion, murder, and death statutes into alignment. If Texas is really interested in protecting the baby's life, as it claimed, then it should welcome this opportunity to clarify what it is doing.

Democracy is Not the Dark Ages

If Roe v. Wade is overruled, all that happens is our representatives can now vote on it. That's it, democracy, that's what happens. Overrule Roe, and all of a sudden it matters who is sitting on the state legislature. Boy, wouldn't that be interesting, if people actually had to pay attention to who was sitting on their state legislature. Wow. Political involvement at the local level. That's kind of a novelty. Might want to try that. Might be more democratic than five unelected people spouting rhetoric about the rights of woman.

Instead of recognizing that democracy has its fans, Blackmun rants about the incipient dark ages. He is literally assuming that no State will allow abortions. What happened to all those millions of women whose hopes and visions you see, Harry? Can't they vote? Why can't they shine the light?

Either you are speaking for the millions of women who can vote and win elections, or you and you fellow elitists have dictated an unenumerated right that most Americans dislike. You can't have it both ways.

To be irresponsible is bad enough. To dictate an arbitrary rule is bad enough. But to dictate an arbitrary rule, and then deny even the possibility that you fucked up, this is what outrages. To opine that pro-lifers are oppressing women. Yes, pregnancy keeps women from reading books. Pregnancy keeps women from work, from feminism, from equality. Pregnancy keeps women in the darkness. Pregnancy does that.

Does it not bother feminists that millions and millions of women, not just Republicans, are pro-life? Does it not bother feminists that feminists themselves are pro-life? That Susan B. Anthony was pro-life? That Elizabeth Cady Stanton was pro-life? That Margaret Sanger--yes, the racist and eugenicist founder of Planned Parenthood--was pro-life? We don't want her, but we got her. Are all of these women part of the darkness? Is Mother Teresa part of the darkness?

This is not to say that Mother Teresa is the fount of all knowledge. I'm reading one of her speeches and going, "You tell 'em, Sister." And then she veers off into an attack on contraception. And I'm like, "Killing sperm? What's wrong with that? I do that. Sperm? What? What?" This part of her speech is when the pro-life crowd starts shuffling its feet and looking at the ground. Tess is like, "What happened? I lost them."

I think she's wrong, okay? I think the Catholic church lost some moral authority on birth control--at least in the USA--and people do not listen, as they should, to the church on abortion. But the Catholics have a point. Evangelicals have a point. The pro-lifers have a point. If I am wrong and the Sister is right, or we are both wrong and Harry is right, have a vote on it. Democracy is not actually the dark ages, Harry. You unelected fuckhead.

You're Darth Vader. No, you are. You are!

Harry Loses His Mind

"Four members of this Court (are) poised to cast into darkness the hopes and visions of every woman in this country." This is the rhetoric Blackmun adopts after Roe. He has decided to talk about his opponents like they are Darth Vader.

"I fear for the darkness as four Justices anxiously await the single vote necessary to extinguish the light."

What I fear is that Stevens will be up there when he is 622, doing wheelies on his robot body. "I'm feeling good."

"I am 83 years old. I cannot remain on this Court forever..."

This is not Justice Stevens. This is Justice Blackmun. What if Ponce de Leon had discovered the fountain of youth? There goes democracy. We would never, ever, get any of these Supreme Court assholes to retire. Ever! You think I'm kidding. Huh.

"All that remained between the promise of Roe and the darkness of the plurality was a single, flickering flame."

Harry Blackmun writes passages like this with a straight face. Not even a giggle. How do I know he's serious? Because three years later, upon reflection, he's so proud of what he's written that he cites himself. His opponents are the forces of darkness and he, Harry Blackmun, is one of the light people.

You remember 1968, the summer of love? Part of the dark ages. Every year before 1973 was part of the dark ages. Oh, that wonderful day when Harry showed us the light and led us out of our cave. Our cave of patriarchy.

"For today, the women of this Nation still retain the liberty to control their destinies. But the signs are evident and very ominous, and a chill wind blows."

This is coming from a man who admits in a secret memo that he doesn't know what fucking point to pick. The Court made up some arbitrary shit. People on our side, millions of people, flip out and say he's a baby-killer. And this is his response? This is what he writes? A chill wind? A chill fucking wind? Is blowing?

There goes my spleen. My spleen burst.