GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: SCOTUS side-steps showdown over abortion

domingo, 2 de junio de 2019

BioEdge: SCOTUS side-steps showdown over abortion

BioEdge: SCOTUS side-steps showdown over abortion

Bioedge

SCOTUS side-steps showdown over abortion

by Michael Cook | 2 Jun 2019 |

This week the US Supreme Court touched the third rail – abortion – and lived. In a relatively modest decision, Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, the Court voted 7-2 to uphold a provision in an Indiana law which requires abortion providers to bury or cremate foetal remains. It refused to review another section in the same law which prohibits abortion on the basis of the sex, race or disability of a foetus.

According to The Economist, the ruling may have been the handiwork of Chief Justice John Roberts. Although the Indiana law could have been used to overturn or modify Roe v. Wade, a decision by the Supreme Court would have coincided with the heat of the 2020 elections and would have been seen as nakedly political.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the only African-American on the bench, used the opportunity to write a fascinating 7000-word history of abortion’s links with racism and the eugenics movement.

Most journalists ignored it or ridiculed it.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate said that Thomas had attacked women who have abortions as “callous and monstrous child-killers” – a slander which he made up out of thin air. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire, wrote that Thomas had gone “bananas”. Garrett Eps, in The Atlantic, said that Thomas was part of "the far-right wing of African American conservatism". Adam Liptak, at the New York Times, barely mentioned it.

But Thomas was making an important point. The last time the Supreme Court addressed the issue of eugenics was in 1927 in Buck v. Bell – and it enthusiastically endorsed it. SCOTUS all-star Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr wrote for the majority: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

This appalling decision has never explicitly been overturned. Ninety-two years later, a correction is long overdue.

Justice Thomas’s impassioned essay is a first draft of a SCOTUS apology for Buck v. Bell. He highlights “the fact that abortion is an act rife with the potential for 'eugenic manipulation'” and argues that “Having created the constitutional right to an abortion, this Court is duty bound to address its scope.”

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

An interesting group within the American pro-life movement is African-Americans who oppose abortion. The Rev Clenard Childress Jr, for instance, is a New Jersey pastor who runs a website called Black Genocide. Groups like his highlight the fact that African-American women account for a third of abortions in the US.

This might have been remained a factoid about the US abortion wars, but it was unexpectedly placed on centre stage this week with the Supreme Court's decision in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky. Justice Clarence Thomas, the only African-American on the bench, was seething with anger when he reflected on the fate of black babies (see our story below):

abortion in the United States is also marked by a considerable racial disparity. The reported nationwide abortion ratio— the number of abortions per 1,000 live births—among black women is nearly 3.5 times the ratio for white women. And there are areas of New York City in which black children are more likely to be aborted than they are to be born alive—and are up to eight times more likely to be aborted than white children in the same area.

Journalists who bothered to report his remarks shook their heads and described him as loopy. He's not. That abortion has a disproportionate impact on the poor and disenfranchised is a blot on American society. For a touching comment on this, check out this rap song from a group called Flipsyde, Happy Birthday.