http://action.afa.net/Blogs/BlogPost.aspx?id=2147496024In Shannon Coffin’s piece in National Review Online, Coffin makes the startling revelation that Elena Kagan and her eugenically-inclined comrades were willing to make up medical science on the fly to justify sucking the brains out of half-delivered babies.
According to Coffin, the Supreme Court, in striking down Nebraska’s ban on partial-birth abortion in 2000, relied on specific language from a “select panel” of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), which presents itself as a nonpartisan group of physicians.
According to Coffin,
ACOG declared that the partial-birth-abortion procedure “may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.” The Court relied on the ACOG statement as a key example of medical opinion supporting the abortion method.
When President Bush later signed a federal ban on partial-birth abortions, federal judge Richard Kopf enjoined the ban (later overturned by the Supreme Court) and spent more than 15 pages citing ACOG’s statement and lauding the scientific integrity of the process that led to the statement.
Here’s the shocker. The central statement, the one the Supreme Court relied on in 2000, was not written by either obstetricians or gynecologists. It was written by policy hack Elana Kagan.
In fact, the original language, written by, well, actual medical professionals, said that the ACOG panel “could identify no circumstances under which this procedure . . . would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman.”
Kagan noted in a memo that if this medically accurate statement remained in the final report, it would be a legal and public relations “disaster” for the hopes of the left to slaughter as many unborn babies as possible before and even during delivery.
So she rewrote it.
Her suggested edit was adopted verbatim, and it turned the report language on its head. What Kagan wrote - and what ACOG adopted - was this:
“An intact D&X [the medical term for a partial-birth abortion], however, may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.”
As Coffin points out, this statement “became one of the greatest evidentiary hurdles” faced by Justice Department lawyers (of which Coffin was one) in defending the ban.
After all, who is going to argue with the pre-eminent medical and biological experts of the day?
Only it turns out it wasn’t pre-eminent medical and biological experts making that claim at all, it was a political hack in the Clinton White House with zero medical background who now wants to sit on the Supreme Court.
As John McCormack of the Weekly Standard observes this morning, “If Kagan twisted science to advance her political agenda, why wouldn't she do the same to the law?”
This is alarming to a spectacular degree, but is of a piece with the disdain the left has for science in general. Science is only useful to them if it can help them make a case for wildly left-leaning policies. If true science doesn’t support them, they scrap the science or even worse rewrite it.
Two other examples of scientific chicanery from the left come immediately to mind. One is the way in which the left has jury-rigged climatology to prop up the preposterous claim that man is causing catastrophic global warming. This shameful episode in modern science has finally been exposed for all to see, and the cover-ups, the manipulation of data, the burying of evidence that would challenge the prevailing view, the silencing of voices of opposition, has left the theory in tatters and rightfully so.
The second example is the mindless devotion of the left to the theory of evolution, which no one has ever seen (honest scientists will admit that no one has ever observed evolution actually occurring), and which contravenes everything we happen to know about the laws of logic, energy and matter, thermodynamics and genetics.
Yet mind-numbed scientists and their compliant little puppet students blindly cling to an utterly bankrupt theory of origins. Why? Because it gives them an excuse to push God out of the public square. If he didn’t create everything, why do we need to bother with him and his standards for conduct?
Back to Kagan. So much for President Obama’s pledge to “restore science to its rightful place.” Conservatives are perfectly willing, in fact eager, to do just that. It’s the left - including our likely next Supreme Court justice - who are willing and eager to distort whatever they have to, ignore whatever they have to, and rewrite whatever they have to to prop up the dangerous social policies they want to pursue.
It is time to restore science to its rightful place. What is clear is that liberals and Democrats are the wrong ones to do it.
Topic: Kagan and the left despise true science (Read 1196 times)