If you want to make the standard, the infliction of pain, then abortions will come to include a shot of anesthesia.

Whether or not the fetus is capable of feeling pain is a medical and moral issue, not a legal one.

This ruling will keep the abortion issue in view for the election. The judge's statement that a fetus feeling pain is irrelevent should give even some pro-choicers pause.

Another Clinton appointee.

Like the slimy one himself, no cares for the pain he inflicted on others - as long as he satisfied his own needs!

Michael: With due respect, that's one heck of a non sequitur. One imagines that the pain a torture victim feels should be a moral and medical, not legal issue, too? Rape victims? Battered women?

Nice logical leap.

" but no right is absolute. "

Boy OJ, you got a lot to learn.

"She agreed with abortion rights activists that a woman's right to choose is paramount..."

this opens itself up to the 'post-birth abortion' debate, if our desire is to provide the mother with a choice to treat her child as she wishes. rather sickening.

Chris:

Torture, rape, and battery are all illegal because they inflict harm, not because they're painful.

Pain belongs to the civil side of the law.
I don't expect to see any aborted fetuses suing for damages, although it would be amusing in a macabre way.

Michael: Really? What harm besides pain, precisely? What happens to a torture victim that we find so very bad if not pain?

You misunderstand the division between civil and criminal law. I may be charged with inflicting pain on another (through torture, say, or even, in some states, false imprisonment) and I may be sued for the same act, under a very slightly different theory of the law.

You're also making a false division: Pain and harm, in the physical contexts, are pretty much inseparable. The fetus feels pain because he or she is being harmed. The torture victim feels pain because he is being harmed. We don't outlaw yelling "Boo!" at old women, though that may frighten (and therefore harm) them; we do outlaw chopping them to bits while they're awake and screaming.

Similarly, chopping a child to pieces while she cannot even scream, but can certainly experience unbelievable pain in the process, should be sanctionable at law.

Your distinction is a difference without bite.

What's at stake here is the fundamental right of the powerful to exterminate those powerless people whose existence is inconvenient to them: "unwanted" fetuses, . . . old people in nursing homes whose care costs the state medical system more than they're worth, . . . the mentally retarded, . . . Jews, Gypsies, Kulaks, et cetera. I'm not exaggerating or being hyperbolic--the mentality of abortion and euthenasia is the mentality of state-sponsored mass killing. Once you've decided that individuals have no inherent worth, you can easily define whatever people you want to get rid of as "non-persons"--and then you can get rid of them.

So now we have judges condoning the killing of viable babies who are unlucky enough to have already been born. But it's BUSH who is evil.

Good thing for future fetuses that today's under-30 generation is largely disgusted by such reasoning.

Since when is a "right to choose" in the Constitution? Yes, it is the slogan of the pro-choice lobby, obviously, but the Consitutional argument in Roe v. Wade is over "privacy". So have we now reached the point where judges use slogans as grounds for their decisions? Sounds to this observer like this judge deserves impeachment.

Jeff:

What, exactly, "privacy" has to do with having a major medical procedure attended by a full medical staff is one of life's little mysteries.

Yesterday, the local radio news kept repeating (the quote is more or less accurate, but the key phrase is exact) "Scott Peterson is going on trial for killing his wife, Laci, and their fetus." Conservatives just need to keep forcing the contradictions, and the law will change.

How can privacy ever be a defense when another person is involved?

That's the contradiction.

The fact that, in real life, we call the "products of conception" a baby (as in the telling sentence: "She lost the baby") means that unregulated abortion cannot long survive.

David-

The contradictions in "right to choose" have been of little consequence since Roe. Our society has slowly transformed itself into one of base license and "self-interest" without self-awareness in order to rationalize those contradictions away. The women of the left and their male supporters may be too far gone to even to see the possibility that the devaluation of human life necessary to support their position will eventually destroy western civilization. Of course, is that not the goal of the radical pro-abortion left?

Tom: Slowly, but surely, we're winning this fight. Since Roe, abortion has been a proxy for women's lib and its strongest supporters have been motivated (one might even say manipulated) by their fear that "losing" abortion will be the end of women's rights.

Now, we have a sea change happening around us. More and more women start to see that the right to vote, or the ability to work are different from the right to kill their unborn child. They realize that the fetus is a child, worthy of protection. Blacks, too, are starting to realize the damage that abortion has done to the community. In 20 years, severe limitations of abortion -- or even the outright ban of abortion on a state-by-state basis -- won't be controversial.

I don't mean to suggest, of course, that 50 years of state-sanctioned baby murder should be forgotten, or is a small price to pay, or that the left should be forgiven.

Missing from this discussion is an analysis of the motivation behind the pro-death movement. Cui bono? Who stands to gain if the culture sunders the connection between sexuality and reproduction? I suggest that behind the culture of death, from the lies about overpopulation to the scissors in the back of the baby's head lies the proven enemy of humanity--the homosexual.

Lou:

Rather it is the State, once we are all totally atomized we have nothing else we can depend on.

OOPS ... just realized I mistyped my earlier post ... "unlucky enough to have already been born" should read "unlucky enough to have not already been born".

David - I too find the privacy argument tenuous, but didn't even bother commenting on that, since most Constitutional scholars seem to agree as well. Not that I am one, of course! And I too am hopeful that slowly this big ship is turning around. The best news in my mind is that the under-30 crowd is very pro-life, and it would seem they would only get moreso as they get older and have kids of their own.

Lou and OJ, I'd say it's more the inertia of the industry built up around the original misguided idea that abortion was somehow empowering rather than belittling; now there are many many millions of dollars at stake. Single issue causes always turn into industries that have to grow bigger or slowly die. It would be interesting to see just how much money NARAL and other pro-abortion forces contribute to various candidates and especially to the Democratic Party itself. Of course, I hope and pray there is a special place in hell for all of them.

David-

You are optimistic, I am not. Who knows, pro-life activity may be classified as a hate crime in the not too distant future.