Daniel Greenfield at Frontpagemag, discussing the current Supreme Court case on Roe v Wade:
When the Supreme Court took on its latest abortion case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied that babies in the womb feel pain. “There are spontaneous acts by dead-brained people. So I don’t think that a response by a fetus necessarily proves that there’s a sensation of pain or that there’s consciousness,” the ‘Wise Latina’ coldly argued.
Sotomayor’s denial that a baby feels pain was in sharp contrast to her passionate conviction that murderers who kill children experience pain as they receive the death penalty. A few years ago, when Billy Ray Irick’s case came before the Supreme Court, Sotomayor was his biggest fan. Irick had beaten, raped, and murdered a 7-year-old girl, but Sotomayor furiously fought for him.
“If the law permits this execution to go forward in spite of the horrific final minutes that Irick may well experience, then we have stopped being a civilized nation and accepted barbarism,” she ranted.
A one-sided coin is clearly counterfeit. So is one-sided sympathy. Profound worry over a few seconds or minutes of discomfort from an IV injection, as the rapist and murderer of a 7-year-old is executed. But total unconcern about pain felt by a developing baby old enough to suck its thumb, as it is dismembered. This gross inconsistency goes beyond the immoral and reaches the irrational.
There is a saying that you can’t reason someone out of an idea they weren’t reasoned into in the first place. We must admit that this applies to activists on both sides of the abortion issue. Still, this may not be an entirely bad thing. Reason can take us far, but not all the way. There must be moral absolutes at the boundaries, or there will be no boundaries, and that’s dangerous for a person and for a nation.
Killing convicted child murderers, after all appeals have been exhausted, is “barbarism.” But dismembering unborn babies is quite all right. A mind that can hold both these beliefs simultaneously is not a mind that I would trust in the guy who sweeps the floor, much less in a Supreme Court justice.
