Life Advocacy Briefing

Supreme Court Clings to Roe

FIVE OF THE NINE JUSTICES of the Supreme Court – including Chief Justice John Roberts – turned their backs on the Constitution, on common sense and on compassion last Monday, ruling against Louisiana’s law requiring abortionists to have hospital admitting privileges within 30 miles of the killing center.

The Chief Justice claimed in an opinion concurring with the “majority opinion” that the Court’s clinging to precedent was more important than the principle underlying the statute being struck. The precedent he cited, ironically, was a high court strike-down in 2016 of a similar Texas statute; the irony dripped from his pen, as Mr. Justice Roberts himself had voted against disallowing the Texas law.

“In his concurring opinion,” reports LifeSiteNews writer Calvin Freiburger, “Chief Justice Roberts acknowledged that he had ‘joined the dissent in [the 2016 Texas case] Whole Woman’s Health and continue to believe that the case was wrongly decided. The question today, however,’” he said in extraordinary claim, “‘is not whether Whole Woman’s Health was right or wrong but whether to adhere to it in deciding the present case.’” One wonders what he would have done with the Dred Scott ruling in the mid-19^th century – fought a civil war over it? Or how about clinging to the precedent of the 1896 pro-racial-segregation ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson?

The Chief Justice did not offer an explanation as to what is wrong with the Louisiana legislature seeking to aid in enforcing the requirement that persons committing abortions at least be licensed physicians, as well as to improve the chances that the abortionist would be around to follow up care for victims of botched abortions.

The latter basis for the law was no doubt a major sticking point for the abortion cartel, as America’s growing shortage of doctors who are willing to kill unborn babies is driving abortuaries to hire drive-by abortionists, who fly back out of town as soon as their deeds are done. This business model is clearly about profit, not at all about “health care.”

Louisiana’s attorney general, former Congressman Jeff Landry (R), offered a compelling argument in March for upholding the statute. “‘Louisiana abortion providers have a record of non-compliance with basic safety regulations,’” he said, quoted by Mr. Freiburger, “‘and now they want a special exemption from generally accepted medical standards that apply to similar surgical procedures in our state. … Women seeking abortions,’” he said, “‘deserve better than that; they should have the same assurance of prompt and proper care in the event of complications.’”

Last week’s ruling, writes Mr. Freiburger, “means a reprieve for Louisiana’s three abortion facilities and the preservation of a major obstacle to other states regulating the abortion industry. It also means the Court missed an opportunity to make a broader determination on the underlying legitimacy of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which force all 50 states to permit most abortions,” notes the LifeSiteNews writer. “In January,” he reports, “more than 200 Members of Congress signed a brief urging the Court to use the case as an occasion to reconsider Roe.”  Chief Justice Roberts and his leftish fellow travelers appear to have no interest in righting the wrong and ending the legalized killing.

Quoteworthy

PITHY QUOTE FROM THE DISSENTING OPINION of Justice Clarence Thomas, summarizing his objection to the ruling in the Louisiana case and to the Chief Justice’s participation in it. We quote Justice Thomas’s complaint from a televised Fox News Channel report by nightly news host Laura Ingraham: “The plurality and the Chief Justice … conclude that Louisiana’s law is unconstitutional under our precedents. But those decisions created the right … to abortion out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text. … Our abortion precedents are grievously wrong and should be overruled.”

Helping Voters Focus

THE CLOSE, TWISTED OUTCOME of June Medical Services LLC vs. Russo elevates the abortion issue for voters making their choice for President this November; the Court, in a way, has put itself on the ballot.

Among those who voted to doom preborn babies – and in too many cases their vulnerable mothers – to injury and death, two have already attained their 80^th birthdays. Justice Stephen Breyer (named to the Court by Pres. Clinton) is nearly 82, and Justice Ruth Ginsberg (also a Clinton appointee) is 87 and in fragile health.

The two justices who were appointed by Pres. Donald Trump – Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Brett Kavanaugh – both voted to acknowledge the Constitutional right to Life and the power of the states to govern conditions in abortuaries, as did George W. Bush appointee Samuel Alito and George H.W. Bush appointee Clarence Thomas. The two Obama appointees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, voted to invalidate the reasonable Louisiana statute.

Planned Parenthood Seeks to Block Iowa’s New Waiting Period

PLANNED PARENTHOOD HAS RUSHED INTO COURT through their ACLU mouthpieces to seek to block Iowa’s new 24-hour waiting period abortion law before the Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) even had a chance to sign it, calling the new law, reports Martin Burger for LifeSiteNews, an “‘arbitrary barrier to safe, legal abortion.’”

Gov. Reynolds did sign the law last Monday, just two days before it was set to take effect. In a statement quoted by the Associated Press, Gov. Reynolds declared, “‘I am proud to stand up for the sanctity of every human life. … I applaud the Iowa lawmakers who had the courage to stand strong and take action to protect the unborn child.’” The legislature’s action came unexpectedly in the waning hours of their 2020 session, as we reported last week.

Said Erin Davison-Rippey, whom the LifeSiteNews writer identifies as Iowa Executive Director for Planned Parenthood North Central States, “‘This law is really about shaming Iowans and making it harder to access abortion.’”

The law requires abortionists to perform an ultrasound examination of the targeted baby and to offer the aborting mother a view of the ultrasound and a factual identification of the observable tissues and organs.

A previous Iowa waiting-period law was struck down by the Iowa Supreme Court in 2018, but that law, explains Mr. Burger, “had required mothers to wait a full three days before getting an abortion.” The US Supreme Court upheld a 24-hour abortion waiting period requirement in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, ruling, notes Mr. Burger, “that it ‘rationally furthers the state’s legitimate interest in maternal health and in unborn life.’”

‘Life’ is a Human Right!

PRES. DONALD TRUMP SIGNED TWO MEASURES on human rights issues during June – one an executive order and the other a Congressionally passed law.

The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, reports Paul Smeaton for LifeSiteNews, is “aimed at curtailing human rights abuses in [Red] China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous region,” where “more than a million Uyghurs, most of whom are Muslim, are believed to be held in concentration camps by the [Communist] Chinese government.

“A 2018 UN report,” notes Mr. Smeaton, “found that human rights abuses in such camps include brainwashing, beatings, torture, rape, forced abortions, forced sterilizations and summary executions.”

The President’s executive order on religious freedom, signed earlier in the month, “could become another important tool to fight an international right to abortion at the United Nations,” reports Stefano Gennarini JD, writing for the Center for Family & Human Rights (C-Fam).

The Executive Order on Advancing International Religious Freedom, notes Dr. Gennarini, “directs the Secretary of State to ‘advocate for United States international religious freedom policy in both bilateral and multilateral fora.’ It also directs the Secretary of State to leverage the influence of the US Agency for International Development to achieve this goal.”

The emphasis on religious liberty confronts, among other things, the efforts by “UN agencies and European donor nations,” writes Dr. Gennarini, “[to] increasingly take the position that abortion is a humanitarian right, and therefore health providers and personnel who provide international aid cannot deny women abortion, even if they have conscientious objections based on moral or religious grounds.” The President’s executive order elevates America’s determination to respect such conscientious objection and pushes back against the UN’s growing push against US policies respecting religious conscience on “reproductive rights” policy.

“The new executive order,” notes C-Fam, “also requires any federal agency that delivers foreign assistance to ‘ensure that faith-based and religious entities, including eligible entities in foreign countries, are not discriminated against on the basis of religious identity or religious belief when competing for federal funding.’ If implemented,” writes Dr. Gennarini, “the order could help prevent future US administrations from discriminating against faith-based and pro-life groups,” as happened under the Obama Regime.

Whom Is Planned Parenthood Kidding?

June 11, 2020, BreakPoint commentary by Stan Guthrie

            The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police has brought out huge numbers of people to protest police brutality and racism while pledging their solidarity with aggrieved African Americans. It has also made for some exceedingly strange bedfellows.

            Exhibit A just might be Planned Parenthood and Black Lives Matter. For example, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Oregon states, “Black and Brown communities in the United States have suffered murder, violence, trauma and overt and covert racism perpetrated by white people and white-led systems and institutions throughout our country’s entire history. This state-sanctioned violence and murder is not new, but it is intolerable and horrific and must stop. Black lives matter.”

            Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast says, “The over-policing of Black bodies extends far beyond the actions of individual police officers. It is in our workplaces, our schools, our public institutions. It is in our healthcare system. It is that same policing of Black bodies that makes the promise of reproductive freedom unattainable for so many Black people in this country.”

            The cognitive dissonance of Planned Parenthood attempting to appropriate the racial justice mantle is almost intolerable for those of us who have been fighting for the lives of unborn human beings – unborn black human beings included.

            Planned Parenthood, after all, was founded by the eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who said, “Birth control does not mean contraception indiscriminately practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction of defective stocks – those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

            And just who are these “human weeds” and “defective stocks?” Sanger helpfully gives us a clue as she goes on, “The results of the intelligence tests, the menace of indiscriminate immigration, the fertility of the unfit and the increasing burden upon the healthful and vigorous members of American society of the delinquent and dependent classes, together with the growing danger of the abnormal fecundity of the feeble-minded, all emphasize the necessity of clear-sightedness and courage in facing the problem, and throw new light on the possibilities of Birth Control as a practical and powerful weapon against national and racial decadence.”

            They are, in her words, immigrants, the “unfit,” the “delinquent and dependent classes,” and the “feeble-minded.” She then commends birth control not as a means of rational family planning but as a “powerful weapon against national and racial decadence.” Birth control as a weapon against racial minorities.

            Of course, proponents of Planned Parenthood might retort that those incriminating words were uttered a century ago, in an era when racism was much more common. Very true. But it’s doubtful that Planned Parenthood would apply this same charitable hermeneutic to other entities, such as the Southern Baptist Convention or the United States itself. They might add that such historical racism is more a function of ignorance than of embedded DNA.

            To which we would say, “What about today?” And today, Planned Parenthood, however the organization’s stated goals may have changed, still appears to be on a mission to eliminate people of color, if you judge by results. According to Illinois Right to Life and the 2010 Census, 79% of the Planned Parenthood surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of minority communities. And this is not without effect. In some cities, such as New York, black abortions outnumber black live births by thousands every year.

            “In 2014, 36% of all abortions were performed on black women, who are just 13% of the female population,” reports the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley. …

            If the plaintive cries for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder have taught white Christians anything, surely it must be that we are obligated to listen to the life experiences of our black brothers and sisters, lament with them when called for and join hands in working toward constructive, and truly Christian, solutions. But surely those solutions must include the generations of African Americans not yet born.

Why Were the Abortuaries Even Permitted to File this Suit?

June 7, 2020, Washington Examiner op-ed commentary by Angie Thomas & Thomas Glessner

            [The first paragraph lays the groundwork for the comments below with a brief description of the Supreme Court case which is outlined at the outset of this Life Advocacy Briefing.]

            … The law in question is Louisiana’s Unsafe Abortion Protection Act, which requires abortion providers to hold admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their practice. The law closed a loophole that allowed abortionists to get around this requirement, even though it applied to all other doctors. The regulation passed with bipartisan support in 2014.

            As is the case with many regulations meant to protect the safety of women during an abortion, the abortion industry sued to enjoin the law the same year it was passed. They alleged that the act curtails a women’s right to an abortion under Roe v. Wade.

            Most interesting about this case is the fact that the plaintiffs, who claim that they are acting to protect women’s rights, have a questionable background in this regard. Bossier City Medical Suite, a plaintiff in the action, surrendered its license and shut its doors in 2017 because it had performed abortions on at least five minor children and did not file the required statutory rape reports with the authorities.

            Another abortion clinic in the lawsuit, Delta Clinic of Baton Rouge, was closed for a time because a patient suffering from severe bleeding after an abortion was rushed to a local hospital. The clinic was cited in violation of the law when authorities discovered it did not have sufficient supplies to stabilize the patient’s bleeding. Recently, a medical emergency was reported in a New Orleans abortion facility during the Covid-19 pandemic – yet another documented case revealing the tendency of abortion clinics to put profits before patient safety.

            Women seeking abortions have the same right to competent and quality care as patients involved in other surgical procedures. Louisiana’s admitting-privileges law protects that right as it protects women from injuries received from abortion providers such as these plaintiffs.

            So, why can abortion clinics that harm women, as these two have, be allowed to challenge in court a state abortion regulation that protects the health of women? Further, how can they be allowed to assert that they are suing on behalf of women?

            The answer to these questions is found in the twisted rules on standing that apply in the case of abortion. The law now allows abortion providers the ability to challenge regulations that protect the lives of mothers. In doing so, the law creates a legal fiction granting abortion providers standing to represent the interests of the women they injure. This is similar to allowing a car manufacturing company to represent consumer interests when challenging a car safety law.

            … Who is an injured party from abortion regulations such as the Louisiana law in question? If there are any, the injured parties would undoubtedly be women who are harmed by the hospital requirement. However, no woman has sued for an injury that resulted from these hospital regulations. Instead, the very parties who have injured women through abortion are allowed to bring suit, allegedly to protect such women. In actuality, they are bringing suit to protect their own interests. …