U.S. Supreme Court sees the wisdom of Arkansas law on induced abortion.

The reasonable finally emerges

IT’S SAID that the wheels of justice grind slow but exceedingly fine. But still slow. Agonizingly slow. The reasonable and cautious semi-anti-abortion law that Arkansas finally, finally has been allowed to implement was supposed to go on the books on New Year’s Day 2016. It’s taken this long to get through all the lawsuits and appeals and appeals of appeals. Now the U.S. Supreme Court declined to block the law. And that’s that. Or should be.

Lawmakers of this state, representatives of the people, voted in

2015 to require abortion providers—abortion providers?—to contract with a second doctor who holds admitting privileges at a hospital if they cause the abortions with medication. Calling abortionists “providers” is another way that euphemism is used to put the best face on this act. It joins a list of genteelisms so that those in the debate don’t have to get their hands dirty. Think “pro-choice” and “abortion care.”

Arkansas’ law is reasonable. If you give a woman a pill to induce abortion, what could possibly be wrong with having a doctor with admitting privileges on call should something go wrong?

Planned Parenthood—the mother of all euphemisms, that—says the point of the law is to put its clinics out of business. So it had a federal judge put a hold on the law until the nation’s high court weighed in. Which it did Tuesday.

The law doesn’t ban medication abortion outright. Even Planned Parenthood’s people admit as much. But, according to that outfit, it’s all the same because no physicians with admitting privileges are willing to contract with Planned Parenthood’s doctors because of the stigma of being associated with abortionists.

Well.

If there is a stigma attached to abortionists, then maybe there is something wrong with abortions. It’s encouraging to hear Planned Parenthood admit that much, at least.

One of the doctors involved in this case was quoted in the papers saying that medication-induced abortions were limited to the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, and it, and its surgical cousin, are “incredibly safe.” We assume she didn’t include the person being killed in the procedure. For the baby involved, abortion of any kind might be considered incredibly unsafe.

OF COURSE, not everybody is happy with the top court’s refusal to hear an appeal. For best example, the papers quoted Brandon Hill, president and CEO of this region’s Planned Parenthood headquarters: “Arkansas is now shamefully responsible for being the first state to ban medication abortion. This dangerous law immediately ends access to safe, legal abortion at all but one health center in the state. If that’s not an undue burden, what is? This law cannot and must not stand.”

Cannot stand? Since when is Brandon Hill a member of the United States Supreme Court? Some of us think those members in good standing will have more to say about what the law can and cannot do.

Shameful? Mr. Hill makes assumptions. Some of us are anything but ashamed to be in this class, and this state.

Health center? More wordplay to disguise what goes on there.

We agree more with Jerry Cox, of the Family Council, who called the action “very good news for people who care about the safety of women in Arkansas. It’s not too much to require an abortion doctor to have a contract that allows him or her to have their emergency patients … admitted to a local hospital. Women who are bleeding from a botched abortion shouldn’t have to drive to the emergency room and admit themselves into a hospital.”

Jerry Cox seems to know what’s happening in abortion clinics, and tells it with the bark off. And there’s only so much a lowly editor can do to clean up the language. Even the term “abortion” doesn’t explain what’s really happening. Words will tell, even if many people won’t.

Language is the Little Round Top of this debate, as it is with so many others. And both sides have been trying to get the high ground for years. Once language is abused this way, soon thinking can be too. And so the killing of a child becomes antiseptic. Clean.

We’re sure that those who support this American way of death would like for it all to be shielded from view. For it is horrible. But others of us would like for these “medications” and “procedures” to be explained in full. After all, this isn’t a pedicure we’re talking about.

Lawmakers should be commended for taking this step to protect women, and we don’t just mean the 50 percent of the babies who would grow up to be women if only given the chance. Also, the state’s constitutional leaders didn’t give up; the 8th Circuit made a common-sense ruling, and the nation’s top court let it stand.

PLANNED Parenthood had one more volley to fire before closing shop for the day Tuesday. It released this to the press:

“If this law is allowed to continue, it will be hardest for people who already face barriers to care, including people of color, young people, and those with low incomes.”

Actually, some of us believe that the young people in the womb, who don’t have jobs yet, thus very low incomes, and who face extreme “barriers to care” when killed in the dark, will not be hardest hit. Just the opposite.

Maybe all this verbicide today is a symptom of our collective uneasy conscience when it comes to abortion. Maybe that’s why so many of us want to, need to, hide behind phrases like abortion care and pregnancy related services and call our organizations Planned Parenthood and rally around causes like “family planning” and “choice.” To call things what they are may be too difficult.

Pope John Paul II, who famously opposed the culture of death, whether it was abortion or euthanasia, didn’t muddy the waters when he talked abortion. He told the truth. As if it was a commandment. The pope who’d oversee the fall of the Soviet empire and a new freedom on the earth took the time throughout his life to argue against abortion and the killing of the least among these.

He said such killings were crimes against society. Or as he put it: “Human life finds itself most vulnerable when it enters the world and when it leaves the realm of time to embark upon eternity.”

Call them words to live by. Hopefully some day for all of us.