Today I am going to do something that I have never done before, I am going to turn the Spade over to a guest writer. Charles Davenport Jr. is a columnist whose work appears in on my local papers, The Greensboro News & Record and he is a solid conservative. I usually read his articles that appera in the paper, and while i don't always agree with his viewpoints, I can always respect them. That is what seperates us from the liberals, we can disagree on some points without being drummed out of the movement....but I digress.

The article that I am about to post eals with the issue of aboton and the recent SCOTUS decison on partial birth abortion. I reprint it with Mr. Davenport's permission because he is able to express many of the feelings that I have on the issue, but have been unable to adequately express. So enjoy the article, as I did, and feel free to leave any comments you may have.

A victory for the defenseless

From the (Greensboro, NC) News & Record of Sunday, May 27, 2007

Critics of last month’s Supreme Court decision on abortion have portrayed the ruling as an assault on women’s “constitutional right to choose,” and a dangerous precedent that could open the door to additional restrictions. In truth, the Court has prohibited only one, particularly vicious type of late-term abortion, a method pro-choice activists call “intact dilation and extraction.” Critics of the procedure prefer the term “partial-birth abortion,” which is inflammatory, but dreadfully accurate. Consider the testimony of a nurse who witnessed the method performed on a 26-week fetus and described it to the Senate Judiciary Committee:

"Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby's legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby's body and the arms--everything but the head...The baby's little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby's arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall. The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby's brains out. Now the baby went completely limp." For the sake of comparison, Jamie and Jennifer Brannock have graciously contributed an ultrasound of their 20-week fetus, Jordan Lynn, who is due September 15.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg filed a dissenting opinion in which she criticized the Court for weighing the “moral concerns” of partial-birth abortion. Likewise, in a Counterpoint feature earlier this month, Greensboro’s B.J. Weatherby expressed “outrage” over the Court’s utilization of “moral norms.” The author, who refuses to use the term “partial-birth abortion” (“a vile, gruesome name designed to make everyone shudder”), asks readers, “whose norms” should determine matters of “privacy and individual rights.”

If a procedure is vile and gruesome, the term used to describe it should be vile and gruesome, unless of course, one’s intent is to conceal the nature of said procedure. An explicit description of intact dilation and extraction (or whatever we call it) should make everyone shudder—or at least, everyone with a conscience. The Constitution says nothing about a “woman’s right to choose” the taking of an innocent life; it certainly does not condone the killing of infants in a fashion mere inches and seconds away from infanticide.

Justice Ginsburg expressed dismay over the Court’s utilization of “moral concerns” in prohibiting partial-birth abortion, and Weatherby demanded to know whose “moral norms” should prevail. But morality is the cornerstone of law. The collective conscience dictates that robbery, rape, and murder are morally wrong, therefore illegal, and punishable by law. Civilized societies condemn barbarism. Behavioral and moral norms, as reflected in the collective conscience, are enforced by law.

Would defenders of partial-birth abortion argue that a prohibition on rape or murder is an unacceptable “imposition” of someone else’s morality? Intellectual consistency would lead them to such conclusions; but no, they are selective about when the imposition of morality is acceptable. In this case, the collective conscience (the moral norm) has declared partial-birth abortion cruel, inhumane and, contrary to the claims of its defenders, unnecessary.

Nevertheless, virtually every prominent Democrat has condemned the Court’s decision. Former Senator John Edwards called it “ill-considered,” a “hard right turn” that reminds us of how much is at stake in the 2008 election—meaning, of course, “a woman’s right to choose.” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said the ruling is “a departure from four decades of Supreme Court rulings that recognized the importance of women’s health” and an “erosion of our constitutional rights.” In the 90s, President Clinton vetoed a ban on partial birth abortions. Twice. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi condemned it as “a significant step backward.”

While researching this topic, I stumbled across an editorial on the death penalty that appeared in these pages two months ago. The irony of one sentence from the editorial board’s closing paragraph is staggering: “Physicians are trained to treat every life as valuable, and government should not try to use its power to undermine the moral underpinnings of the practice of medicine.” Inversely, when physicians do not treat innocent life as valuable, when the practice of medicine has abandoned its moral underpinnings, doesn’t the government have a responsibility to enforce the collective conscience?

Charles Davenport Jr. (www.cdavenportjr.com) (daisha99@msn.com) is a freelance columnist who appears alternate Sundays in the News & Record.