On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeating the error of Chief Justice Rober B. Taney in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. In her decision regarding whether fetal remains should be treated as medical waste, or cremated as required by the law under consideration, Justice Ginsburg took strenuous issue with Justice Thomas’ characterization of pregnant women as, “mothers.” This harkens to the infamous Dred Scott decision, where Chief Justice Taney ruled that no black, slave or free, could claim U.S. citizenship. The parallels are as striking as they are revolting.
In both decisions, Dred Scott and Box v. Planned Parenthood, opinions moved jurisprudence in the wrong direction, breaking with either previous court decisions, or with the Constitution itself. Prior to Dred Scott, Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution treated blacks in slavery as 3/5 a person for purposes of apportioning seats in Congress. So they were 60% of the way to personhood status under the law. The Dred Scott decision stripped them entirely of personhood status and went further to encompass free blacks as well.
In Roe v. Wade the justices declared that they could not tell definitively when human life began, and agonizingly deployed the medieval concept of Quickening in defense of this nebulous boundary between being human and non-human–a boundary that science has NEVER recognized at all. The product of human fertilization is a new human from the moment of fertilization. In the Box decision this week Justice Ginsburg took direct aim at Justice Thomas’ characterization of pregnant women as mothers when she said, “(A) woman who exercises her constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy is not a ‘mother’.”
So, blacks are not persons when we wish to own them as slaves, nor are even free blacks persons when their humanity points to the humanity of blacks languishing in chains. Similarly, pregnant women who wish to abort their children are not mothers if the humanity of wanted babies and motherhood status of the women bearing them might point to the humanity of unwanted babies and the motherhood status of the women seeking their demise. Again, and again, and again, we repeat the same tragic errors of history. Scores of millions suffer and perish because of that error. A singular error. It is this:
Either we see personhood as an intrinsic status that comes with being a human animal/organism, a human being, or we treat personhood as a status conferred on certain human organisms by an intellectual and political elite. We consistently choose the latter. There is no other explanation for the Dred Scott decision, or the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 that upheld racial segregation in the South (The Democrats “do-over” for the Civil War and its results). There is no other explanation for the notorious Buck v. Bell decision that upheld the rights of the states to forcibly sterilize the developmentally disabled. There is no other explanation for the Nazi Nuremberg laws that stripped Jews of the personhood status, or for the infamous Koramatsu decision that upheld the right of the government to herd Japanese-American citizens into concentration camps during war based solely on their ethnic ancestry.
And then came Roe, Doe, and Casey.
We live in an age of tragic make-believe. Men are women if they believe hard enough. Women are men if they believe hard enough. One may wish away the biological reality evident in the mirror when one steps out of the shower. So, too, can one magically wish away the human identity and status of the child in the womb, and even one’s own motherhood status. In both, we engage in surgical mutilations to ensure the delusional ideation. It’s science denial on steroids.
Pope Benedict XVI had a prescient observation some years ago, one that goes a long way to explaining these tragic errors we can’t help repeating as a people:
People such as Justice Ginsburg don’t see humanity as a fundamental good. They see it as a status, and themselves as the arbiters of who is granted that status. So this week’s Box ruling will go down as a split decision. On the one hand, the court upheld the part of the law in question that requires cremation of aborted fetal remains. That takes us a significant step toward recognizing the fetus as more than mere medical waste. On the other hand, Justice Ginsburg has staked out the same ground as Taney and the majority in Dred Scott.
Finally, it was never the vision of the Founding Fathers that God, and Judeo-Christian anthropology be banished from the public square. Freedom of religion was never in their minds the same as freedom from religion. It is why they set forth the idea of unalienable rights that come from a “Creator,” whom they identify as, “Nature’s God.” It is why they stated that the whole purpose of government is to secure the rights that come from God, which man cannot take away. It is why they further stated that whenever government becomes destructive of that purpose it is the right of the people to alter or abolish that government, and to elect new government that will be faithful to the end of securing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–the fundamental rights that come from God.
Taney and Ginsburg are two justices who committed themselves to being destructive of those ends. Those who cheer the words of Ginsburg are the very people hostile to religion, with doubts about God, and it shows in their doubts about humanity, beginning with their own.
Justice Ginsburg took strenuous issue with Justice Thomas’ characterization of pregnant women as, “mothers.” ????? This might be fantastic new to millions of men who have been named and charged with prenatal expenses… because it would remove them from the equation as the “father”. Way to go, Ruth!
This is an excellent article in general, but I think you err when you say that, “Prior to Dred Scott, Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution treated blacks in slavery as 3/5 a person for purposes of apportioning seats in Congress. So they were 60% of the way to personhood status under the law.”
This is a very common understanding of what that provision in the Constitution meant, but it’s wrong nonetheless. If it had been intended to make an ontological statement about the personhood of slaves, it would be expected that slave states would NOT want them counted at all and free states would have wanted them counted fully. But this is the opposite of what was actually the case.
Each individual slave was counted as a whole person, but only 3/5ths of them were counted at all. The slave states wanted ALL of them counted, so as to maximize the number of Congressional representatives from those states, while those states with a larger population of abolitionists didn’t want slaves counted AT ALL. Why, after all, should slave states be rewarded and empowered in Congress because they were home to an oppressed population that couldn’t vote? Counting only 3/5ths of the slaves (as whole persons) was a compromise to get the Constitution approved. Illogical – of course! But that’s the case with many political compromises.