EDITORIAL/Let the states decide
In the biggest challenge to the scourge of abortion in decades, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority last Wednesday signaled they could allow states to ban abortion much earlier in pregnancy and may even overturn the right that was created out of thin air nearly 50 years ago.
The outcome probably won’t be known until next June, but after nearly two hours of arguments, all six conservative justices, including three appointed by former President Donald Trump, indicated they would uphold a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
To be sure, about 60 abortions a week are performed at the state’s only abortion clinic in Jackson.
Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t resist and rejected the idea that a fetus that has the ability to move and react to pain is a human life that should be protected from abortion.
“Virtually every state defines a brain death as death,” Sotomayor, appointed by former President Barack Obama, said during oral arguments.
“Yet, the literature is filled with episodes of people who are completely and utterly brain dead responding to stimuli,” Sotomayor continued. “There’s about 40 percent of dead people who, if you touch their feet, the foot will recoil. There are spontaneous acts by dead brain people. So I don't think that a response to — by a fetus necessarily proves that there’s a sensation of pain or that there’s consciousness.”
What a disgusting and callus analysis from a liberal who has little regard for human life defined by her own Catholic church as beginning at conception.
Justice Sotomayor may have forgotten that the Lord gave human beings a soul and a brain. And we contend that murder is murder, particularly a murder of convenience because of loose morals and the so-called free sex of the liberal 1960s.
On the other hand, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, asked whether the court would be better off withdrawing completely from the abortion issue and letting states decide.
“Why should this court be the arbiter rather than Congress, the state legislatures, state supreme courts, the people being able to resolve this?” Kavanaugh asked. “And there will be different answers in Mississippi and New York, different answers in Alabama than California.”
Letting states decide is the proper course. There is no right to abortion in the Constitution.
Abortion may become illegal or severely restricted in roughly half the states if Roe and Casey are overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, and what a victory that would be in ending this scrouge.
Our own state Sen. Jenifer Branning was in Washington and spoke at a rally outside of the court prior to the hearing last week.
“All life has value, and that value doesn’t just start at birth. As elected officials, we have an obligation to do everything within our power to preserve that right, and I am proud that our citizens and legislators have worked closely together to make Mississippi the safest state in the nation for the unborn,” she said at the rallly.
“As a legislator, but most importantly as a mother, I have both a legislative and a moral responsibility to protect human life and the unborn, all while promoting the health of women.”
Justice Sotomayor compared babies in the womb to dead people. Think about it, Justice Sotomayor compared babies in the womb to dead people.
There is no dispute about whether or not an unborn baby is in fact a baby, a living human being. There is no debate about whether a baby is viable outside of the womb, it’s a question about whether the baby’s life matters and it does.