WASHINGTON, D.C., May 29, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday it was upholding part of an Indiana pro-life law while letting another section remain blocked, left-wing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took the opportunity to criticize one of her colleagues for referring to women who abort their preborn children as “mothers.”
The 2016 law banned abortions sought specifically because of a preborn baby’s race, sex, ethnicity, or potential disabilities, and required that fetal remains be either “cremated or interred” rather than disposed of as “infectious waste” or “pathological waste.”
On Tuesday morning, the Court issued an order reversing the Seventh Circuit’s decision to invalidate the fetal burial provision, while declining to reverse its judgment against the provision banning discriminatory abortions until additional appeals courts take up such laws. The Supreme Court did this without taking a position on the law’s legal merits.
The conservative Clarence Thomas issued a lengthy concurring opinion explaining that such pro-life laws “promote a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics,” detailing the abortion industry’s historic ties to the eugenics movement, and warning the Court that while it “declines to wade into these issues today, we cannot avoid them forever.”
In her written opinion, Ginsburg expressed that she would have allowed the Seventh Circuit’s block of the fetal burial provision to stand, and in a footnote took issue with some of the language Thomas used in his concurring opinion. A “woman who exercises her constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy is not a ‘mother,’” Ginsburg declared.
Many pro-lifers rebuked Ginsburg for the claim, including prominent pro-life mothers.
“I think it goes to show the utter blindness coming from abortion advocates here,” said Live Action president Lila Rose, who is expecting her first child. “The reality is that she is a mother, and there is a human life there. And yes, we have bodily rights just like men, but men can’t use their body to harm or inflict harm on somebody else’s body, and women don’t have that right either. I don’t have a right to harm a body that’s inside my body, that’s unique, an individual, another human life.”
Oh please. Of course she is. A mother of a dead child, yes, but a mother nonetheless. That this makes people who support radical abortion laws uncomfortable and embarrassed is not an argument for denying reality. https://t.co/3sp1RWWEgQ
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) May 28, 2019
In a footnote of his own, Thomas wrote that Ginsburg’s “dissent from this holding makes little sense” in light of her suggestion the burial requirement would constitute an “undue burden.” Thomas found that argument “difficult to understand, to say the least—which may explain why even respondent Planned Parenthood did not make it.”
Ginsburg responded by suggesting that treating the remains of aborted babies with dignity causes trauma to their mothers.
Thomas’ critique “displays more heat than light,” Ginsburg claimed, because (among other reasons) the “cost of, and trauma potentially induced by, a post-procedure requirement may well constitute an undue burden.”
In fact, under the law mothers are only responsible for any costs if they “choose a location of final disposition other than the location of final disposition that is usual and customary for the health care facility,” meaning the only “burdens” the law places on women are whatever personal inferences they draw from recognizing the humanity of their dead children.