Our Great Regime Supreme: The Supreme Court and Partial-Birth Abortion

by Harold O. J. Brown

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	Harold O. J. Brown, PhD is Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Professor Emeritus of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and an Advisory Board member of The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity
	Post Date: June 29, 2000

Dr. Leroy Carhart of Nebraska was in the Supreme Court building [yesterday] to hear that eminent tribunal by a 5-4 vote, overrule the Nebraska law that prohibits Dr. Carhart's particular technique of baby butchery. Justice Steven Breyer , who wrote the majority opinion, stated that the interest in protecting the lives of viable unborn children must be "balanced" against a woman's right to "choose" not to bear an unwanted child, whose birth might subject her to unspecified indignities. The "balance" he decreed means that until the actual moment of fully emerging into the air, a baby may be butchered with impunity.

If that is "balance," what would imbalance be? As Justice Thomas observed in his dissent, this decision will make it harder for the thirty other states that have banned the procedure to continue to do so. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, contributing the fifth vote necessary to overrule the Nebraska law, found it too "vague," and sanctimoniously opined that a law written more to her liking might be "constitutional," as though to suggest that under some future circumstances she could ban the killing of nearly born babies.

This decision, together with other recent decisions such as that which banned student-sponsored prayer at football games, reveals that the Court arrogates to itself the supreme power over the Congress, the state legislatures, and the people, however expressed. If the United States Constitution were a divinely-inspired, inerrant document given by the Deity for the resolution of all human questions, and if the Justices, or at least a pentarchy of five of them, were divinely inspired, infallible interpreters of the divine will, this would be plausible. But the Constitution was drawn up by humans -- now dead white males, as a matter of fact -- representing at the time a small population of fewer than four million--and our Oracles are not divine but humans, two women and three men. Or perhaps one should withhold the name human from beings who can so glibly and so portentously rationalize the butchering of nearly born human babies. CBHD