Let the Python Eat Its Tail. Amen.
April 25, 2007
By John Piper
Read
this resource on our website.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion of the Supreme Court in upholding the ban on
partial birth abortions on April 18, 2007. It is astonishing to read the
opinion (PDF). The detail with which abortion is discussed exceeded my expectation.
Kennedy’s own descriptions of the various forms of abortion are explicit and extensive.
Descriptions of the procedure of partial birth abortion (“intact dilation and
extraction”) are given from both doctors’ and nurses’ perspectives.
For example, one nurse described the procedure on a twenty-six-week-old
“fetus” as follows—and remember this is a quote from Justice Kennedy’s
official Supreme Court decision:
Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby’s legs and pulled them down
into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby’s body and the arms—everything but the
head. The doctor kept the head right inside the uterus. . . . The baby’s little fingers were
clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the
back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like
a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall. The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a
high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby
went completely limp. . . . He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby
in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used. (p. 8)
There is a certain irony to the argument for the Supreme Court’s ruling. One
argument against the necessity of a health exception for the mother was that alternative methods of
abortion are legally available, if necessary, even at this late stage in the pregnancy. For example,
the ordinary D&E (dilation and extraction). The irony is that the Court concedes that the “the
standard D&E is in some respects as brutal, if not more, than intact D&E” (p. 6). In other
words, in normal, legal abortions, the baby is torn apart limb from limb while still in the womb,
but in a partial birth abortion, the baby is mercifully spared the dismemberment and his brains are
quickly sucked out of his head.
Such are the contorted conditions in which we find ourselves: The proposal of a
manifestly barbaric law (permitting the dismemberment of a partially born child) is defeated by the
legal standing of a more barbaric law (permitting the dismemberment of a child in the womb). But the
history of Providence has many such stories to tell—great evils finally being self-destroyed,
like a python swallowing its own tail.
Pro-abortion
politicians tremble as they see it coming. Barack Obama worries that “this ruling will
embolden state legislatures to enact further measures to restrict a woman’s right to
choose.” The Supreme Court erred, he said, because partial birth abortion is “a matter
of equal rights for women.”
This use of catch phrases is surely tired. “Right to choose.” “Equal
rights for women.” The grandchildren of the sixties are waking up to the vagueness and danger
of those phrases. Right to choose what? Anything? All laws that protect children limit the
rights of moms (and dads) to choose. You can’t choose to starve them. You can’t choose
to lock them in closets for three weeks. You can’t choose to abandon them. You can’t
choose to strangle them five minutes after they are born.
And “equal rights for women”—equal with whom? Equal with the
irresponsible dad. Dad has sex and bears no responsibility for the baby. Mom should be equally able
to have sex and bear no responsibility for the baby. Young people are looking at this and saying:
Something is wrong with this picture. Maybe our lives are as broken as they are because our
parents have twisted their hearts and minds so deeply to justify equality in irresponsibility.
Hilary Clinton opposes the Supreme Court decision because “the rights and lives of
women must be taken into account.” Yes. That is mainly what this forty-page opinion of the
court does. Read it. And it will be interesting whether Senator Clinton will have any opinion about
moms and dads who want to abort their little girls, but not their little boys. I think the younger
generation may ask the senator: Should the life of little women be taken into account, or only big
women?
I pray that ahead and behind of the delegalization of abortion will flow waves of inner
repentance as we awaken to the outrage of assaulting God’s image-bearers in the very moment of
his knitting them together in their mothers’ wombs (Psalm 139:13).
Pastor John
