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Killing By Any Other Name Is Still...	By Fr. Joe Landi, Editor
Read Fr. Landi's story of conversion--Fr. Joe  Landi:  Out of the World and Into the Kingdom-- His journey to priesthood  by Rissa Singson.

          Recently commenting on the Nebraska ban on partial‑birth abortions, under the title of, “A Ruling for Abortion Rights,” the repugnant act of intentional killing of a baby, a San Francisco Chronicle editorial claimed: “The justices wisely saw this measure for what it was: an unconstitutional intrusion on a decision that should be between a woman and her doctor.”  Their editorial didn’t mention that there was a minority opinion reflecting the public’s revulsion to partial birth abortion.  Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a gist of what perhaps 2/3 of the public thinks about partial-birth abortions, stated, they are “too close to infanticide.”

I f you are in the 1 / 3 that thinks partial‑birth abortion is an O.K. thing, read what Brenda Shafer, a pro-choice nurse who attended a partial-birth abortion in Ohio in 1993, reported to John Leo in U.S. News & World Report. (July 10, 2000)   “The doctor delivered the baby’s legs and arms, everything but his little head.  The baby’s body was moving; his little fingers were clasped together. He was kicking his feet.  The doctor took a pair of scissors and inserted them into the back of the baby’s head and the baby’s arms jerked out in a flinch, a startled reaction like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall.  Then the doctor opened the scissors up.  Then he stuck a high-powered suction tube into the hole and sucked the baby’s brains out.”  John Leo observes, “There is no ‘too close’ about it. It is infanticide!  And with a lot of tortured mental gymnastics, it has just been protected by our highest court.”  It is lawful murder.

. In a subsequent issue of the Chronicle, appeared support for its editorial position by Ellen Goodman writing in the Boston Globe and reprinted as filler in the Chronicle. Goodman asserts,  “The controversy has always been about language as much as law. In a public relations coup, a semantic first strike, anti‑abortion strategists grabbed the most highly‑charged emotional vocabulary. They scored debating points in the endless, irreconcilable fight with the creation of a term partial birth abortion.”  Perhaps, but the killing of an infant by any name is still infanticide whether the mother, the doctor, or the boy next door does it.

Goodman takes a swipe toward the organized opposition by the Christian churches to abortion, singling out the Catholic Church, which fits right with the present mood at the Chronicle.  She writes: “The Catholic bishops projected the image of women who chose to abort at seven or eight months in order to fit into a prom dress.”  Talk about a “semantic” point.  Having a baby, killing it, and leaving its corpse in the restroom wastebasket or dumpster makes for a slimmer figure, too.  But it’s a real downer for whoever finds it.

The Chronicle & Goodman heralding the high court’s majority opinion smoke screen that the Nebraska law was too broad and didn’t take into account the health of the woman, doesn’t fly either.  Given the high court’s 1973 Doe vs. Bolton and its broad interpretation of what constituted the health of the woman, any law with “relative to the well‑being of the patient” in it, would forbid no partial birth abortions at all.  With this in mind, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, “The majority’s insistence on a health exception is a fig leaf barely covering its hostility to any abortion regulation by the state‑a hostility that Casey (1992) purported to reject.”  Besides, the former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, in documents filed with the court, pointed out that “partial‑birth abortion is never medically necessary to protect a mother’s health or her future fertility.

The majority opinion in the Nebraska law is not the final word.  It is only a temporary one.  With this decision and its lack of moral turpitude, the pendulum has gone as far as it can.  It will swing the other way as surely as the day follows night.  Pray for an early dawn

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