Killing Babies is a Bad Choice

Killing Babies is a Bad Choice

By Dean Dexter

There is a sign on the wall where I work. It reads: “Killing Babies is a Bad Choice.” I could not help but look at it off and on throughout the day following the U. S. Supreme Court’s recent decision reaffirming abortion rights.

The news accounts talked of court “precedent,” of “Women’s rights,” of political “winners” and “losers” in an election year, of the “fight” continuing on both sides. Once again, as happens so often when the subject of abortion comes up, especially in the press, there was no talk about the babies.

No talk at all about the 1.7 million pre-born human babies aborted each year in the United States because of what five out of nine Supreme Court justices think.

Looking at the sign – it is actually a bumper sticker given to my boss, former U.S. Senator Gordon Humphrey – I thought of the bookish, reclusive son of New Hampshire, David H. Souter, elevated to the court in 1990 amid reassurances from then-White House Chief of Staff and former N.H. Governor John H. Sununu (an abortion foe) that this appointment would be a “home run” for conservatives (sentiments to which former state Attorney General, GOP guru, and close Souter friend Tom Rath lamely explained: “…there’s a difference between being a political conservative and a judicial conservative.”)

Seeing the sign and thinking of Souter’s leadership in framing the Pennsylvania decision, I thought of a term my grandfather often used for highly intelligent, well educated people who seemed to lack common, everyday country horse-sense. “Educated fools,” he’d call them.

Since the June 29^th (1992) decision, Souter has been lionized in the New York Times as the new “anchor” for the court’s ideological center, an “unlikely” leader in the court’s search for “common ground,” who works in his office seven days a week, from 8:30 a.m. to nine at night, eating only an apple and a bit of yogurt for lunch.

In comments from the bench, Souter said over-ruling Roe “would subvert the court’s legitimacy beyond any reasonable question. If the court were undermined, the country would also be so (undermined)…Roe has not proven unworkable in practice,” adding that to overturn Roe would be “a surrender to political pressure.”

(Roe not unworkable? With hundreds of thousands on both sides screaming and marching in the streets each year? With the bones of pro-life protesters twisted and broken as they are hauled off to jail in city after city?)

Justice Anton Scalia, in his written opinion, laughed at Souter’s tortured logic: “What makes all this relevant to the bothersome application of ‘political pressure’ against the court are the twin facts that the American people love democracy and the American people are not fools…by foreclosing all democratic outlet for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish.”

Justice Souter’s cheerleaders in New Hampshire, all of them, either politically moderate or liberal, have pointed proudly to Souter’s enormous respect for the traditions and precedents of court decisions themselves, of his love for the judicial process as a steadying social force, of his fondness for privacy and books and of his refusal to let anyone else cut the tall grass at the family homestead in Weare.

All of this charming, tweedy eccentricity aside, the message at least on this point from Justice Souter and his fellows in the majority is a stark one. Notably, the intellectual perambulations of the court as an institution are more important than human life in its most gentle and vulnerable form – a very new precedent in our country’s legal history, indeed, when one realizes Roe overturned nearly 200 years of state’s rights on the matter of abortion, and is itself merely 19-years-old (as of this writing – ed.).

The word from the federal courts these days, in fact, is its safer for a boney, gnat-infested brown spotted owl to live and grow deep in a Washington state timber forest that it is for a five-month old human baby girl, with a beating heart and clear discernable brain waves, to live and grow slowly in her mommy’s womb on the northwest side of Washington, D.C.

That does not sound like common, everyday country horse-sense to me, Mr. Souter. Killing babies is a bad choice.

This piece originally appeared as the lead guest editorial in the July, 14, 1992 edition of The (Manchester, N.H.) Union Leader.

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