withallyourmind.net

Most, by now, have no doubt heard of the very important Supreme Court decision handed down this week on the partial birth abortion ban. The decision was 5-4 to uphold the government’s right to ban this especially gruesome procedure which had been voted into law and signed by President Bush in 2003. I have not commented on this, but many others in the blogosphere have. I would recommend a couple of analyses that I’ve read.

Al Mohler provides his helpful analysis here. On the significance of this decision, Mohler writes that it…

… acknowledged that, for many, even the most common abortion procedure is “a procedure itself laden with the power to devalue human life.” This is rather amazing language in itself, but Justice Kennedy then argued that the partial birth procedure “implicates additional ethical and moral concerns that justify a special prohibition.”

The explicit inclusion of this moral language marks a great achievement in this decision. So is the decision’s acknowledgement that “it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.”

April 18, 2007 will go down in history as a landmark day in the struggle to recover human dignity and the sanctity of human life. This ruling is an important step toward that recovery — and we still have a very long way to go. There is reason to believe that this decision may be even more important than might first appear. After all, the majority opinion does recognize that for many citizens, any abortion is “a procedure laden with the power to devalue human life.”

Richard John Neuhas, of First Things, discusses the decision here. He echoes Mohler’s assessment of the significance of the ruling:

Justice Kennedy’s 5-4 majority opinion is notable for accenting the society’s legitimate, indeed imperative, interest in protecting innocent human life. That interest had received lip service in Roe and its judicial offspring, but this time it is an operative, albeit not a controlling, concern. President Bush hailed Carhart as bringing us closer to the goal of “a society in which every child is welcomed in life and protected in law.” A very little bit closer to a goal still painfully far away.

Neuhaus provides sharp insight in this excerpt in which he discusses law and morality:

I expect it is in the minds of many, but so far there has been only marginal public comment on the fact that all five in the Carhart majority are Catholics. What can one say? Know-Nothings of the world unite? It is not a peculiarly Catholic perception, but it is an emphatically Catholic perception, that legitimate law cannot be divorced from morality. And in this constitutional order of representative democracy, the relationship between moral judgment and law is best expressed by the legislature. Almost a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared that the realm of law should be entirely purged of moral judgment or vocabulary.

That, of course, is itself a moral dictate. But over the past fifty years, the Court has followed that dictate on numerous issues, thus reinforcing what has been called the naked public square. The Ginsburg dissent is right: In previous decisions, especially those dealing with abortion, the Court said there was no place in law for the “imposing” of moral judgments. Carhart, by way of contrast, evidences a respect for moral discernment, especially as expressed by the legislature. Every law of consequence reflects a moral judgment. The abortion license imposed by Roe previously enjoyed a most particular exemption from moral inquiry. Carhart quite clearly says that that exemption is now expiring.