A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

PBA ban

While I’m in sympathy with the spirit of such a law, I’m a bit skeptical of the logic. After all, the point is to ban a certain procedure, rather than to, say, ban all abortions after a particular point of development. It’s hard to see why it’s not ok to kill an unborn child by means of this particular procedure, but ok otherwise (indeed, part of the Court’s rationale for letting the law stand was that there are always alternative procedures available).

It seems to me that it’s coherent to hold that human life should be protected from conception onwards, or to hold that the fetus/unborn child comes to merit greater degrees of protection over the course of pregnancy. But it’s harder, I think, to make a coherent case for selectively disallowing certain ways of killing the unborn child while allowing others at the very same stage of pregnancy.

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8 responses to “PBA ban”

  1. Pithlord

    I don’t ultimately disagree with you, but for some people there is an intuitive difference between a death which happens inside the women’s body and a death which occurs outside. Since there is no perfect way to draw a discrete line in a continuous process, I would agree with the court that the matter should be left up to legislative judgment.

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  2. Lee

    That’s a fair point; I do think that adds a ceratin gratuitousness to the procedure that seems to make it more questionable. I just think it’s an odd tack for the prolife movement to take where seeking a ban on all late-term abortions (say) seems like it would make more sense as an incremental step.

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  3. Pithlord

    I agree with that. It makes no sense as an incremental goal for the pro-life movement, since they would have to agree with Ginsburg that where the fetus’s legs are at the time of death is morally irrelevant.

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  4. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    Does that mean you would think them somehow at fault if they protested what we might dub “full birth abortion,” quite separately and apart from (though, of course, in addition to) protesting other late term abortions?

    This is a new procedure in which the abortionist reaches into the Mom’s womb, grabs the baby’s legs, and draws the legs and body, but not the head, out of the mother, just as he would for a partial birth abortion.

    But instead of then reaching into the womb and jambing scissors into the baby’s skull and then suctioning out the brain, he continues to draw the baby entirely out of the womb.

    And then he lay it on a table, pierces its skull, and sucks out its brain.

    Much safer for Mom, this way. Much less chance the guy stabs her while trying to stab the kid through the skull. None at all, really.

    Medically recommended.

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  5. Lee

    I’m not really faulting anyone except insofar as I question the enshrining of the principle that it’s how rather than when you perform the abortion that makes it morally problematic. I understand the political reasons for it, I think, namely, that PBA is particularly gruesome and thus makes for a vivid illustration of the horror of the act. Likewise in your example, it would be strange at least to oppose only a particular method of infanticide. Though, perhaps you could make a case for it similar to how people who support euthanasia would undoubtedly oppose certain ways of carrying it out.

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  6. Pithlord

    Anothere example is the death penalty. There are methods of execution that the public would consider too gruesome to allow. Even if these preferences are irrational (i.e., unrelated to the amount of pain experienced), would it be *unconstitutional* for legislators to act on them?

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  7. CPA

    The Partial Birth Abortion ban is a political strategy to effect a political end. The end (both the elimination of the bogus insertsion of abortion into the 14th amendment and the actually legal toleration of abortion in general) is good. The means for moving the political ball down the field is not intrinsically immoral. That it doesn’t quite seem to make sense philosophically is therefore irrelevant. The main aim is to get people to think and to get justices to establish in print, in the record, things like the state has a compelling interest in protecting unborn life. Over all, the squeals of dismay from the abortion lobby is the best indicator that this decision is a good thing.

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  8. Lee

    I’m not objecting either to the political strategy or the law as such. However, since part of the justification offered for upholding the ban is that there are alternative methods of abortion available at the same stages of pregnancy, I wonder how much it really establishes by way of the state’s interest in protecting the unborn?

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