Op-Ed: Federal Judge Cites Sympathy for Abortion Providers in Disastrous Ruling
Something terrible happens to human hearts when the killing of the unwanted becomes routine and is declared an essential service, even in times of public emergency.
Hardness of heart takes over. We take up a defensive position that insists that those killed are not human beings like us. They have no rights — they are “lawfully” expendable. The window of opportunity to kill them is “time-sensitive.”
On Sunday, in a revealing opinion, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson removed Alabama’s restrictions on abortions that were part of a ban on elective medical treatments during the coronavirus pandemic.
What was most disturbing in Judge Thompson’s argument was his marked sympathy for “the providers” of routine death treatments, which are the core business of abortion clinics everywhere.
“A clear, enforceable standard,” he wrote, “is especially essential given the long history of anti-abortion sentiment in Alabama and nationwide.”
“Said history is no secret to any abortion provider in Alabama — it is evident ‘when she opens the newspaper, drives by a group of protesters at a clinic, or learns that another piece of legislation concerning abortion has been enacted.'”
“[T]hese events have inarguably yielded a ‘climate of violence, harassment, and hostility,’ … that pervades the day-to-day work of abortion providers in Alabama.”
The truth is that the real climate of violence exists in the abortion clinics themselves, where the day-to-day work of abortion providers is precisely to kill defenseless human beings.
Since Roe v. Wade, over 61 million American children have been violated and killed in their mothers’ wombs. Continuation of a pregnancy is natural and normal and requires no violence or force to be exercised against the mother or her child.
In fact, it is in the deliberately imperiling, aggressive act of abortion that a very real and substantial violence is perpetrated – an act of violence that brutally ends a child’s life in utero.
Yet Judge Thompson expressed zero sympathy for the utterly vulnerable human targets scheduled for termination by the abortion “providers.” In the 56 pages of his opinion, recognition of these human targets, each one a unique lively presence in her or his mother’s womb, was never once acknowledged or even mentioned.
Judge Thompson was not an impartial umpire.
Indeed, he went to bat for those doing the killing in abortion clinics.
Pro-Abortion Propaganda Dehumanizes the Unborn Child
Judge Thompson’s preferential sympathy for those doing the killing is supported, of course, by propaganda that is not without precedent in modern history.
As in the selective killing programs prosecuted at Nuremberg, today’s abortion programs are based on the deeply offensive, prejudiced belief that the victims are less than human, are not useful to our own well-being and our private and political goals and so may be killed with impunity.
The offense here, dehumanization of the victims, was named by one of the judges at the Nuremberg trials as “criminal impertinence.”
“The victim is shown to be inhuman while the executioner is to be pitied. The condemned is put in the wrong and the slayer in the right. A person is robbed of his all — his very life — but it is the assassin who is the sufferer.”
To understand this criminal impertinence charge involving dehumanization of selected victims, the following excerpt from the Nuremberg Trials Record may be helpful:
One of [SS Commander Paul] Blobel’s administrative duties was to conduct executions. History will be his debtor for the authoritative account he rendered on mass executions from the standpoint of the spirit and philosophy of slayer and slain. He was asked at the trial whether the doomed, as they were being led to their waiting graves, ever attempted to break away before the shots were fired. He replied that there was no resistance and this surprised him greatly. The following interrogation then occurred:Q. You mean that they resigned themselves easily to what was awaiting them?A. Yes, that was the case. That was the case with these people. Human life was not as valuable as it was with us. They did not care so much. They did not know their own human value.…Q. And did that make the job easier for you, the fact that they did not resist?A. In any case the guards never met any resistance, or, at least, not in Sokal. Everything went very quietly. It took time, of course, and I must say that our men who took part in these executions suffered more from nervous exhaustion than those who had to be shot.Q. In other words, your pity was more for the men who had to shoot than for the victims?A. Our men had to be cared for.Q. And you felt very sorry for them?A. Yes. These people experienced a lot, psychologically.
Here in cogent language is a dire warning directed to all lawful authorities who would refrain from condemning, or who would actively condone and facilitate acts of lethal violence against any dehumanized group of unwanted human beings on the grounds of sympathy for the perpetrators of the lethal violence.
The perpetrators were misrepresented as the real victims, the only victims: “These people experienced a lot, psychologically.”
Sympathy and Partiality May Lead Judges Away from a Just Decision
Sympathy for those who conduct the killing of the innocent (wherever it occurs) is not always a good counsel in ensuring and delivering true justice for the victims.
It is a profound injustice for any judge to accord partiality and priority to the party responsible for the killing of an unborn child. No matter how much the abortion perpetrators may be burdened with problems, a judge’s concern should extend as well to the innocent party whose very life is at stake.
Yet Judge Thompson declared that “based on the current record, the defendants’ efforts to combat COVID-19 do not outweigh the lasting harm imposed by the denial of an individual’s right to terminate her pregnancy.”
Judge Thompson cited the “lasting harm” to abortion “providers” subjected to this hypothetical cloud hanging over them.
But he ignored completely the real lasting harm — indeed the lethal, everlasting and irreparable harm imposed by the abortionists themselves on little daughters and sons assaulted in their mother’ wombs.
Judge Thompson decided that “guaranteeing practical, reliable flexibility to abortion providers requires an injunction.”
His deep concern was that those executing abortions “will not be met with unconstitutional or bad-faith prosecution. That is, physicians acting lawfully cannot be left to ‘the tender mercies of a prosecutor’s discretion and the vagaries of a jury’s decision.'”
He had no word to say against the unconstitutional and bad-faith execution of innocents in their mothers’ wombs who are denied any due process at all.
These little ones, as members of “our posterity,” are constitutionally entitled to the same protection of the right to go on living and prospering under the “blessings of liberty” that we ourselves enjoy.
Yet Judge Thompson slavishly followed the faulty precedent invented by Justice Harry Blackmun who, in Roe v. Wade, conveniently ignored the existence of the real victims.
These smallest daughters and sons victimized in utero continue to be dehumanized — described dismissively in the abstract as “choices.”
Perpetuating Roe v. Wade’s “Physician-Centered” Defense of Abortion
Judge Thompson on Sunday emulated the same misplaced special empathy with abortionists that skewed Justice Blackmun’s conclusion in Roe v. Wade back in 1973:
“The decision vindicates the right of the physician to administer medical treatment according to his professional judgment … [T]he abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently, and primarily, a medical decision, and basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician.”
This explains why there is some truth behind Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s criticism of Roe v. Wade when in a 2013 speech she faulted the Court’s approach for being “about a doctor’s freedom to practice … It wasn’t woman-centered; it was physician-centered.”
At least we can all agree that it was certainly not child-centered.
And that’s the real shame at the heart of this whole tragedy.
