The Supreme Court’s mind is made up
In Dobbs vs. Mississippi, the Supreme Court heard the most consequential abortion case in three decades. Before anyone uttered a word, it was obvious that the justices would uphold Mississippi’s law banning abortion at 15 weeks, long before the viability line set in precedent.
Also obvious was the fact that the only reason for this new development in abortion jurisprudence is the presidency of Donald J. Trump, who placed three justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — on the court. Unlike abortion decisions in the past, in which justices struggled mightily with competing interests, the back-and-forth Wednesday were the theatrical sounds of a kangaroo court. To quote Justice Thurgood Marshall, “power, not reason, is the new currency of this court’s decision-making.”
Various pro-life justices (and I use that term only in the narrowest sense of “opposed to a woman’s right against forced pregnancy”) had startling things to say. As though he were attending a philosophy seminar, Justice Clarence Thomas repeatedly asked whether a state could punish a woman who took cocaine prior to viability but gave birth to a drug-addicted child after viability. What a fascinating question, Justice Thomas! Perhaps the fact that the law criminally punishes cocaine possession by anybody might offer a clue to this pressing question.
Barrett had a very different inquiry that she repeatedly pressed. We now have “safe haven laws,” she said, permitting anyone who gives birth to drop off her unwanted infant, no questions asked. She seemed to think that this right to drop off the baby that you just delivered eradicates the need for a right against forced pregnancy. She is wrong, for one obvious reason and one more subtle reason.
The obvious reason is that a woman who wants an abortion seeks to terminate her status as a host to what she regards as a parasite. I know that many will find such language offensive — yes, I concur that pregnancy is also for many women a beautiful, miraculous thing — but I am speaking biologically here. When an egg and a sperm cell fuse, the result grows into two separate structures, an embryo and a placenta. But how can a zygote be a person if it grows into an organ and an embryo? Good question.
The placenta is an organ that acts upon the body of the woman and is not in any sense her organ. It extracts from the woman’s blood supply the oxygen and nutrients that the growing embryo needs to turn from undifferentiated tissue into a person. Even if the woman’s body needs the calcium or iron in her system, the placenta will take it from her because its mission is to promote the growth of the parasite/embryo, not to guard the health of the woman.
Among the many other insults that women suffer during pregnancy is the muting of their immune response. Like any parasite, the embryo is foreign to the woman’s body. If her immune response were more robust, it could identify the embryo as a pathogen and eliminate it.
Given how physically intrusive and biologically threatening a pregnancy is, the opportunity to give up children for adoption is completely irrelevant to the wholesale assault that the placenta wages against a woman’s body. It would be as if Barrett told a woman who wanted to stop her husband from raping her that she could just wait until the rape is over and then ask the man for a divorce.
Barrett’s adoption solution is wrong for another reason as well. When one has carried a pregnancy to term and given birth, one will generally be overcome with a sense of attachment to the baby. Babies can be a handful, so we (and other mammals) have evolved to bond to our infants. Once we give birth, having to hand the baby over to someone else is likely to be gut-wrenching and devastating. People who adopt children sometimes forget just how much pain and suffering accompany the surrender of a baby. This can be true even when the baby results from rape or incest.
Imagine a secular court that viewed the embryo or fetus as a potential child rather than the fully formed child that the devout conjure from the moment of conception. Such a court would understand that forcing a woman to carry her pregnancy to term and deliver a baby also forces her to fall in love with the new baby that she did not wish to create. If she does not have the resources to take care of him along with her existing children, she must suffer the additional grief and misery of surrendering her baby. Barrett apparently believes that this two-stage assault against a woman is a win-win. Sadly, she is in the majority.