March 8, 2006
South Dakota's Monkey Wrench
By William
F. Buckley
There is furtive
glee in the eyes of such as Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice
America. The reason for it is that she calculates that the effrontery
of South Dakota's legislature will bring on massive retaliation
by the Supreme Court.
Chinese vigilantes
rejoiced a few weeks ago when a group of dissenters published
a call for diminished censorship. They were confident about what
would happen, and it did: Beijing brought on reinvigorated party-line
censorship. Ms. Keenan and some of her followers in NARAL Pro-Choice
America figure that what South Dakota has done will compel the
Supreme Court to act -- and perhaps in such a way as to smash
the little signs of life in the pro-life moment which, in South
Dakota, gave rise to regicidal inclinations.
The governor of South
Dakota, Michael Rounds, signed a bill that would outlaw the practice
of abortion except in certain extreme cases. In signing, he said
things which, a generation ago, would have been thought too routine
to notice, let alone pause over, but today are fighting words.
"The true test of a civilization," he said, "is
how well people treat the most vulnerable and most helpless in
their society. The sponsors and supporters of this bill believe
that abortion is wrong because unborn children are the most vulnerable
and most helpless persons in our society. I agree with them."
Jumping Jupiter!
Here in three sentences
the governor of South Dakota tramples on the neck of cherished
modern icons. To begin with, he refers to a fetus as a "child."
He refers to "unborn children" as "helpless."
Again, they are "persons." And he invokes the heart
of civilized society to give them succor.
Mike Rounds was a
college student on the sacred holy day of the abortionists in
1973 when Roe v. Wade was pronounced by the Supreme Court. He
was the oldest child in his family; 10 siblings would come along.
The bill outlawing abortion restores to South Dakota a ban that
until 1973 had been the law in almost every state of the union.
Rounds was only 18 years old when the Supreme Court excogitated
the proposition that the Constitution conferred on everybody the
right to eliminate an unborn child.
In the years since
then, various states and various jurisdictions have sought to
refine the right to abort. The South Dakota law could be the springboard
to the direct reversal of Roe. But it is thought by many abortion
supporters that this totalist challenge, posed by South Dakota,
will necessarily be met by a totalist re-endorsement of Roe by
the Supreme Court.
Now everybody concedes
that all this will take a few years. Nobody managing an abortion
clinic in South Dakota is about to shut it down. There will be
injunctions sought against the new law's enforcement. Both sides
have promised to bring money, as required, to mobilize every legal
thought, afterthought and presumptive thought, arguing in conflicting
directions.
The choicers count
five members of the Supreme Court who are publicly committed in
favor of Roe v. Wade. They have this fear, that a sitting member
of the court will retire in the period immediately ahead, when
the incumbent president is still there to nominate a successor.
That would mean five votes, counting Roberts and Alito as dormant
dissenters from Roe v. Wade, who would, in the nightmare scenario,
renounce the 1973 decision as forcefully as the court, in Brown
v. Board of Education in 1954, renounced the segregation authorized
by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
But assume that before
the Supreme Court acts, injunctions against the new law fail.
Assume, then, that there would be a period in which, in South
Dakota, women could not get an abortion. What would they do? Well,
of course, there is the alternative that they could bear the child
whose life they had brought on. But if that alternative were excluded,
what then?
Someone seeking relief
could go north to North Dakota, or south to Nebraska. Or east
to Minnesota, or west to Wyoming. We are talking about bus rides.
And of course so would
it be if Roe were reversed. It is inconceivable that all the states
of the union would imitate South Dakota. To demonstrate just how
progressive is its vision, the state of Connecticut voted contingently
some years ago, that if ever abortion were proscribed elsewhere,
pilgrims would be welcome in Connecticut, where abortion rights
would be faithfully observed.
We are very much driven,
in modern days, by the democratic imperative. Well, the people
of South Dakota have expressed themselves on a political question,
resolving that unborn life is life notwithstanding. And they hold
high what they deem, in their governor's words, their dedication
to stand by "the most vulnerable and most helpless persons
in our society."
Copyright
2006 Universal Press Syndicate
