Who's Your Daddy?

I wasn't going to post for a while but this is just too much. In a 5 to 4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled to uphold a total ban on late term abortions with--here's the kicker--no exception to protect the health of the mother.No exception.The unbelievably reckless and paternalistic opinion was written by Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito.What drove these men to threaten the health of women in this country?Why the desire to protect women from themselves, of course. Apparently there is a virtual epidemic of flip-flipping women who regret having abortions. In the interests of soothing their troubled souls, the majority ruled that all women should be freed of the crushing responsibilty of having to choose for themselves.And I quote from the brilliant Pater of the court himself Anthony Kennedy:"It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound, when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form."Wouldn't a reasonable answer then be to, oh I dont know, maybe inform a woman as to the nature of the procedure she's about to undergo? No, of course not. Best to just take the decision out of a woman's hands.Now to smooth over the fact that these paternalistic bastards have just threatened the health of American women, they go one step further.They make the scientific evidence for the medical necessity of late term abortions vanish into thin air.Are they doctors? you ask. Are these jurists Rennaissance men who know as much about obstetrics and gynecology as they do about jurisprudence? Do they know as much about obstetrics and gynecology as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists who found the procedure to be medically necessary in certain cases?Nope.They just decided to agree with Congress (another group of non-doctors) that there was "medical uncertainty" about the medical necessity.Why?Because that's what you do when your ideological agenda confronts the cold hard facts of reality. You simply make reality vanish. Of all the troubling tendencies of conservative thinkers in this country, this is the most troubling of all. It is intellectually bankrupt, morally corrupt, and a direct assault on the integrity of human thought itself.And, sadly, it has become the defining philosophy of the conservative movement in America. Let's hope that it crumbles quickly, along with the steadily crumbling fortunes of its standard bearers in the Bush Administration, before it does any more damage.