spursncowboys
08-03-2010, 08:48 PM
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/31/barbara-boxer-in-context.html
C-Span recorded her words in the Oct. 20, 1999, Senate colloquy that can be seen today on YouTube. The colloquy concerned the procedure commonly called “partial-birth” abortion. Boxer and other maximalists regarding the “right to choose” prefer the more anodyne but less descriptive phrase “late-term” abortion. Readers can decide which is the more candid denotation of this: The baby is about 80 percent delivered, feet first, until a portion of the skull is exposed. Then the skull is punctured and collapsed as its contents are sucked out.
In the 1999 colloquy, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) said: Suppose during this procedure the baby slips entirely from the mother’s birth canal. “You agree, once a child is born, is separated from the mother, that that child is protected by the Constitution and cannot be killed? Do you agree with that?” Boxer: “I think when you bring your baby home, when your baby is born … the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights.” Santorum persisted: “Obviously, you don’t mean they have to take the baby out of the hospital for it to be protected by the Constitution. Once the baby is separated from the mother, you would agree—completely separated from the mother—you would agree that the baby is entitled to constitutional protection?” She would not say “yes.” Instead, she said, understandably: “I don’t want to engage in this.”
Two issues ago, this column said, “It is theoretically impossible to fashion an abortion position significantly more extreme than Boxer’s, which is slightly modified infanticide.” Her “when you bring your baby home” criterion means that a born baby acquires a right to life only when a mother or family decides to confer that right.
Boxer is caught in the intellectual chaos created by the Supreme Court’s slipshod 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. In it the court was squeamish about a stark fact: Abortion kills. Flinching from that, the court called a fetus “potential life.” But it is elementary biology that when the chromosomes of sperm fuse with those of an ovum, a new DNA complex is formed that directs the organism’s subsequent development. The serious argument about abortion, concerning which decent people differ, is about the moral significance and proper legal status of fetal life at various stages of the gestational continuum.
The court, having flaunted its faux modesty by refusing to say what every high-school biology student knows—when life begins—then immodestly dismissed a deep philosophic mystery by decreeing when “meaningful” life begins. It said it begins at viability—the point at which life can be lived outside the womb.
C-Span recorded her words in the Oct. 20, 1999, Senate colloquy that can be seen today on YouTube. The colloquy concerned the procedure commonly called “partial-birth” abortion. Boxer and other maximalists regarding the “right to choose” prefer the more anodyne but less descriptive phrase “late-term” abortion. Readers can decide which is the more candid denotation of this: The baby is about 80 percent delivered, feet first, until a portion of the skull is exposed. Then the skull is punctured and collapsed as its contents are sucked out.
In the 1999 colloquy, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) said: Suppose during this procedure the baby slips entirely from the mother’s birth canal. “You agree, once a child is born, is separated from the mother, that that child is protected by the Constitution and cannot be killed? Do you agree with that?” Boxer: “I think when you bring your baby home, when your baby is born … the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights.” Santorum persisted: “Obviously, you don’t mean they have to take the baby out of the hospital for it to be protected by the Constitution. Once the baby is separated from the mother, you would agree—completely separated from the mother—you would agree that the baby is entitled to constitutional protection?” She would not say “yes.” Instead, she said, understandably: “I don’t want to engage in this.”
Two issues ago, this column said, “It is theoretically impossible to fashion an abortion position significantly more extreme than Boxer’s, which is slightly modified infanticide.” Her “when you bring your baby home” criterion means that a born baby acquires a right to life only when a mother or family decides to confer that right.
Boxer is caught in the intellectual chaos created by the Supreme Court’s slipshod 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. In it the court was squeamish about a stark fact: Abortion kills. Flinching from that, the court called a fetus “potential life.” But it is elementary biology that when the chromosomes of sperm fuse with those of an ovum, a new DNA complex is formed that directs the organism’s subsequent development. The serious argument about abortion, concerning which decent people differ, is about the moral significance and proper legal status of fetal life at various stages of the gestational continuum.
The court, having flaunted its faux modesty by refusing to say what every high-school biology student knows—when life begins—then immodestly dismissed a deep philosophic mystery by decreeing when “meaningful” life begins. It said it begins at viability—the point at which life can be lived outside the womb.