Intact Dilation and Extraction
By Chad A. B. Wilson
Published April 19, 2007, 2:21 pm in News, Ethics, Morality, & Justice, Rhetoric.
So the gunman sent a multimedia manifesto to NBC during the two hours between killing the two people in the dormitory and going on his rampage in Norris Hall. NBC hasn't released all of the information, but what they did release is scary. It's not scary because the guy is such a psychopath, though. Even if that's true, it doesn't really come out in these tapes. What is scary is that he sounds like a lot of teenage boys.
Basically, this guy Cho is an amateur, disaffected, alienated teenage writer. He vocalizes the same problems as most teenage boys: no one understands, and the world is against him. The references to hedonism are different, but most of the rest seems like the same. Now I'm not a psychologist, so I'm just voicing my uninformed opinion here. The guy was obviously messed up to do what he did. But the real threat is that so many others voice the same ideas.
The message on the Internet is all over the place. First, there is the "be kind to loners" campaign, where people are claiming that loners need to be reached out to. Then there is the call for gun control. And then there is the call for armed citizens. I won't go into detail about these here, but I already suggested that it was inevitable. There's also the call for more stringent mental health standards, especially regarding guns.
Expect more on these topics over the coming weeks and months.
Intact Dilation and Extraction
Today, I want to focus on the abortion debate. Abortion is legal in the U.S., but there are still some restrictions on it. As of this week, the process known as "intact dilation and extraction," or commonly called "partial birth abortion" can be outlawed by states. Yep, the Supreme Court upheld a law banning this procedure.
In order to learn more about this, I read the opinions, beginning with the majority opinion written by Justice Kennedy. I got tears in my eyes. All I could think about was the birth of my two little girls (2.5 years and 9 months) and how if anyone had tried to crush their heads, I would have crushed theirs. I can't stomach reading about that stuff, and I came to a conclusion reading the majority opinion in this case (you can find all of the opinions at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=05-380&friend=nytimes).
Justice Kennedy quotes from several medical staff who gave testimony regarding the procedure, and these two are the most telling. The first is from a doctor describing the procedure in 1992:
"'At this point, the right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left [hand] along the back of the fetus and "hooks" the shoulders of the fetus with the index and ring fingers (palm down).
"'While maintaining this tension, lifting the cervix and applying traction to the shoulders with the fingers of the left hand, the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger.
"'[T]he surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull or into the foramen magnum. Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening.
"'The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.'"
But if the idea of using scissors to open a fetus's skull and a "suction catheter" to "evacuate the skull contents" doesn't get to you, Kennedy offers us this, a nurse's description of the procedure performed on a 26-week-old fetus:
"'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 doctor kept the head right inside the uterus... .
"'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... .
"'He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used.'"
They're describing the exact same procedure, one in unemotional medical terms and one in everyday language. And I'm sorry. All of you women's rights groups can come at me if you want, but I don't call what that woman describes a "medical procedure." I call that murder. I don't care if the baby isn't "viable" or not (although new science shows us that babies can survive at very early ages), I could never fathom dilating and birthing, only to suck the fetus's brains out before it passes through entirely.
So do I uphold this ban on intact dilation and extraction? You bet I do. But it doesn't mean a thing, at least not yet. There are other ways to perform abortion at this stage, so banning one procedure means nothing for the number of abortions performed in the U.S.
Yet both groups--pro-life and pro-choice--are really up in arms about this decision. The pro-choice groups are furious and the pro-life groups are ecstatic. According to the New York Times, groups even held prayers to bless the Supreme Court and George Bush. I can only imagine the curses coming from Planned Parenthood. And notice the difference between every Republican candidate and every Democratic candidate. Each Republican has said it was the right decision, while each Democrat has said it was the wrong decision. But then read the reactions to the reactions (see http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/2008-candidates-on-the-abortion-ruling/) and look to the comments at the bottom.
The conservatives all love the ban and say that the liberals are all idiots who want to kill babies. The liberals all hate the ban and say that the conservatives are Nazis/Taliban idelogues who hate women. There's no agreement here at all, for two reasons:
The conservatives refuse to acknowledge the rights of the woman.
The liberals refuse to acknowledge the rights of the fetus.
They're not even arguing the same things. One is arguing something completely different from the other, such that there can be no common ground. That's what is really crazy.
Tomorrow I will go into detail about the decision and explain where Kennedy and Ginsburg got it wrong.
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