Even in death, Ronald Reagan's insight still shines through. In 1983, Reagan penned an article for Human Life Review on the 10th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. In it, Reagan looked into the core of the matter: what a human life was worth.
To Reagan, abortion was a human ethics anathema: How can one value a baby after it's born yet support killing it before the birth? His answer was that "we live at a time when some persons do not value all human life. They [abortion proponents] want to pick and choose which individuals have value."
Interestingly, Reagan also made mention of late-term abortions, noting that they "show once again the link between abortion and infanticide." Given the court ruling surrounding the recent partial-birth abortion (PBA) decision, Reagan's Alzheimer's might have been a disguised blessing.
Judge Phyllis Hamilton shot down the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, saying it "poses an undue burden on a woman's ability to choose." Hamilton also found the law didn't contain the "health exception" required by a previous Supreme Court decision. And, for kicks, the judge described the law as "unconstitutionally vague."
To the judge, the term "partial birth abortion" was deemed unconstitutionally vague because it wasn't a medical term. Other terms declared vague were "living fetus," "overt act" and "deliberately and intentionally." Apparently, they're all vague terms because it depends on what your definition of "is" really is.
The decision's brashness is further demonstrated in the "health exception" requirement. Hamilton found that the law didn't meet the Supreme Court's requirement despite the law expressly providing for PBAs when "necessary to save the life of a mother."
Overwhelming evidence that PBA is not a medically necessary procedure to save the mother's life was also given short shrift. Doctors the world over, including former Surgeon General C. Everitt Coop, have emphatically stated that the medical technology available is sufficient to save both mother and child. But perhaps the most instructive example of PBA's medical importance comes from Dr. (term herein applied in an "unconstitutionally vague" sense) Morris Haskell.
Haskell is the PBA procedure's inventor. In a 1992 tape that the National Abortion Foundation sold, Haskell described the procedure and then proclaimed he felt "years younger" after performing it. Said Haskell, "Why can't they all be this easy?" His aim was not one of medical necessity but one of expediency; Haskell created the procedure as an easier way to abort a late-term unborn child.
The procedure described by Haskell, the same one upheld by Haskell, is not a medical procedure so much as an execution. Upholding it does little to preserve rights because one class, the unborn, are being denied a fundamental right: the right to live. In a society where every group has a voice, the one group without one is being considered as fetal tissue instead of human life. Then again, Reagan saw through it.
Reagan wrote, "We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life - the unborn - without diminishing the value of all human life." Two decades later, the words still ring true. It's not a gray area; either all life has value or no life is valued. Sadly, some people would overlook the value of life in the name of convenience.
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