The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to take an Alabama case and fix an “aberration” in judicial precedent by banning a gruesome abortion “method [that] involves tearing apart and extracting piece-by-piece from the uterus what was until then a living unborn child.”
But they formally charged that those demands were an “aberration” of normal law.
Chief Judge Ed Carnes lamented in his opinion that he was bound by those standards.
“In our judicial system, there is only one Supreme Court, and we are not it,” he wrote.
Judge Joel Dubina wrote separately to express his agreement with Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia in Gonzales v. Carhart in which Thomas wrote, “I write separately to reiterate my view that the court’s abortion jurisprudence,” including in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Roe v. Wade, “has no basis in the Constitution.”
Now officials at Liberty Counsel have filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the high court encouraging the justices to take the case Steven Marshall et. al v. West Alabama Women’s Center.
There, abortionists in Alabama sought, and got from the lower courts, a ruling that destroyed a newly adopted state limit on abortions.
The case presents a direct challenge to the 1973 Roe opinion that created the “right” to abortion in America.
“Liberty Counsel represents the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and American College of Pediatricians, which are urging the Supreme Court to accept review of the Eleventh Circuit decision and to uphold the law that protects unborn babies, who can feel pain as early as eight weeks gestation, from cruel and unusual punishment,” Liberty Counsel confirmed.
“Although the Court of Appeals invalidated the Alabama law, it did so only because the judges said they were bound by the Supreme Court, which they noted created an ‘aberration of constitutional law’ related to abortion. While disagreeing with the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals acknowledged it is not the Supreme Court,” Liberty Counsel said.
“Alabama’s law is a common-sense solution to a barbaric and gruesome procedure,” said Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel. “If the vilest criminal has human dignity that prevents cruel and unusual punishment, then how much more should the law protect an innocent unborn child from the most despicable form of torture and death? There are just seven countries in the world that allow children to endure this barbaric procedure and that disgraceful list includes the United States. We must make the womb a safe place again.”
The brief notes the accuracy of the description as a “dismemberment” abortion.
One expert quoted there explained, “A leg might be ripped off the fetus as it is pulled … the process of evacuating the fetus piece by piece continues until it has been completely removed.”
When the case was at the 11th, the judges were revolted by the procedure.
They snarked that “a majority” of the Supreme Court “discovered that [abortion] right lurking somewhere in the ‘penumbras of the Bill of Rights’ as illuminated by the ‘concept of ordered liberty.'”
“In this type of abortion the unborn child dies the way anyone else would if dismembererd alive. ‘It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb,'” the ruling said.
“It can, however, ‘survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.'”
The 11th Circuit is not the only court to take the U.S. Supreme Court’s affinity for abortion to task lately. About the same time as the 11th Circuit ruling came down, so did one from the Alabama Supreme Court, which said an unborn baby is a “person” under the law, and, consequently, causing the death of that person can be punished with execution.
Further, in a special concurrence, Justice Tom Parker called on the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that created a “right” to abortion.
“I write specially to expound upon the principles presented in the main opinion and to note the continued legal anomaly and logical fallacy that is Roe v. Wade,” he said. “I urge the United States Supreme Court to overrule this increasingly isolated exception to the rights of unborn children.”
Parker affirmed the Alabama court’s rationale that “unborn children are persons entitled to the full and equal protection of the law.”
He asserted Roe v. Wade is “without historical or constitutional support, carved out an exception to the rights of unborn children and prohibited states from recognizing an unborn child’s inalienable right to life when that right conflicts with a woman’s ‘right’ to abortion.”
“This judicially created exception of Roe is an aberration to the natural law … and common law of the states,” Parker said.
