"If you have to dress something up to obfuscate the truth of
what's in play, you can probably assume it's wrong" -- Part One of Two

Coverage of last week's Supreme Court decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act continues unabated, rolling in like waves to the shore. Naturally, the quality varies, but each account, in its own way, contributes something important to our understanding of the historic Gonzales v. Carhart decision.

I have written six separate pieces on the 5-4 decision and reprinted two others. But the truth is, this only begins to scratch the surface of Justice Kennedy's intriguing majority decision. Suffice it to say, the 39-page explanation operates on many levels, including some, no doubt, that are subconscious.

Several people were kind enough to forward me an op-ed that appeared over the weekend and today, written by Kathleen Parker. Talk about cutting through the fog!

If there is anything that unites critics and supporters of partial-birth abortion alike, it is a realization that this grisly "technique" is an assault on the senses. The difference is advocates want all discussion (beyond "choice" and other equally vapid slogans) off-limits while we want the truth put out on the table.

Parker will have none of this. She takes the soothing medicalese and translates it into plain English. Her operating thesis is, "If you have to dress something up to obfuscate the truth of what's in play, you can probably assume it's wrong." So

"Disarticulating a fetus, which sounds like suspending a pre-born's instant-messaging privileges, means to dismember it," Parker writes.

"Reducing a calvarium -- a thoroughly desirable-sounding procedure, like lancing a boil -- means to suck the brains from the baby's head.

"Separating the calvarium," she writes, "means to sever the head with scissors. "

Always, always, always, pro-abortionists are compelled to make sure executing unborn children is never compared to taking the lives of other human beings. Again, Parker will have none of this.

"When a man murders his wife, we don't say, `Mr. X rendered his wife unalive by efficiently evacuating her cranial cavity with an instrument customarily associated with construction,"'" Park writes. "We say, 'He bashed her brains out in a brutal attack with a claw hammer.'''

She continues, "We apparently have no stomach for similarly descriptive (honest) terminology when it comes to the unborn."

If I may, let me make one other point today. There is no reason to believe that Justice Kennedy does not still support the "core holdings" of Roe v. Wade, as revamped in the Court's 1992 Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision. He was a part of the plurality opinion which simultaneously congratulated itself on ending the abortion debate and claimed to magnanimously allow room for some legislative restrictions.

Imagine Justice Kennedy's surprise when five of his colleagues said (in Stenberg v. Carhart ) that the state of Nebraska couldn't ban partial-birth abortions. When time permits, go to his indignant dissent. (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&linkurl=http://smultron.com/&vol=000&invol=99-830)

Let me reprint just the opening two paragraphs from that dissent:

"For close to two decades after Roe v. Wade, the Court gave but slight weight to the interests of the separate States when their legislatures sought to address persisting concerns raised by the existence of a woman's right to elect an abortion in defined circumstances. When the Court reaffirmed the essential holding of Roe, a central premise was that the States retain a critical and legitimate role in legislating on the subject of abortion, as limited by the woman's right the Court restated and again guaranteed. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey. The political processes of the State are not to be foreclosed from enacting laws to promote the life of the unborn and to ensure respect for all human life and its potential. The State's constitutional authority is a vital means for citizens to address these grave and serious issues, as they must if we are to progress in knowledge and understanding and in the attainment of some degree of consensus.

"The Court's decision today, in my submission, repudiates this understanding by invalidating a statute advancing critical state interests, even though the law denies no woman the right to choose an abortion and places no undue burden upon the right. The legislation is well within the State's competence to enact. Having concluded Nebraska's law survives the scrutiny dictated by a proper understanding of Casey, I dissent from the judgment invalidating it." (Internal citations omitted.)

What really blew the minds of people like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and others outside the Court who could live with this horrific death-dealing "procedure" was that Kennedy supposedly was "very much speaking in the code language of the anti-abortion activists," according to David Garrow, a legal historian at the University of Cambridge, and a staunch pro-abortionist.

By that Garrow was referring to Kennedy's use of "kill" or "killing" 11 times in the opinion, not to mention occasional use of "infant" or "baby." The sentence that seemed to especially to set Ginsburg off was Kennedy's conclusion that "some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained."

As I did for a better part of the last week, I'll continue writing about this case all this week, and in depth in the May issue of National Right to Life News. This is an historic case.

The pro-abortionists know it. So must we.