Hey! David Brooks agrees with me... sort of

He too thinks the Cahart ruling is sort of nonsense:

The Carhart case, which the Supreme Court decided last week, is prompted by revulsion over the practice of killing late-term fetuses. Yet for reasons having to do with political tactics, the law that was upheld wouldn’t even prevent a single late-term abortion. It would forbid doctors from crushing the skull of the fetus, but would permit them to poison and dismember it. Furthermore, the reasoning Justice Anthony Kennedy used to uphold the law — about mothers who may come to regret their abortions — is not only bizarre, but far removed from the original revulsion that prompted the whole issue.

Of course, his solution sounds perfectly arbitrary, too: "[A]bortion [should] be legal, with parental consent for minors, during the first four or five months, and illegal except in extremely rare circumstances afterward."

Comments

There's plenty of dishonest rhetoric here: "In the beginning there is the womb and the creature inside. It is creating 2.5 million nerve cells in the brain every minute, and will have well over 100 billion by the time it is born."

The fetus is clearly not adding 2.5 million nerve cells a minute for 38 weeks, as this would add up to 960 billion nerve cells. It seems more likely that nerve cells do not develop until fairly late in a pregnancy- but you'd never know it from reading Brooks.

Also, Brooks says that Planned Parenthood and Naral are terrified about having an honest discussion of human life, and that a sensible solution would be for abortion to be illegal except in extremely rare circumstances after the first four or five months of pregnancy. However, Brooks dodges the discussion of human life by his refusal to specify the punishment for having illegal abortions. If he believes that a fetus older than 4-5 months qualifies as human life, then abortion after this time should be more than just illegal- it should also be murder.

Posted by: Joel on April 22, 2007 06:45 PM

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