Six judges of the Kansas Supreme Court have earned themselves a lifetime of infamy (and perhaps a longer sentence of worse) with a monstrous ruling that the state’s constitution protects the right to dismember a child in utero.
The Kansas ruling in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt echoes the abomination of Roe v. Wade in both its bloody implications and its preposterous reasoning. If and when the Supreme Court finally discards the long-festering farce that is Roe, the Hodes ruling would continue to make the most vulnerable Kansans fair game, unprotected from slaughter.
“All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights,” Kansas’ Bill of Rights begins, “among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Audaciously, the court’s majority finds the grounding of its opinion for Hodes in exactly that guarantee. The judges continue, “We are now asked: Is this declaration of rights more than an idealized aspiration?”
Clearly the court’s majority does not believe the right to life is even that. The judges do not believe that life is an inalienable natural right, but instead they hold it to be a contingent good, which may be subordinated at times to other interests.
The ruling discerns from “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” a “right of personal autonomy, which includes the ability to control one’s own body, to assert bodily integrity, and to exercise self-determination.”
“The State may only infringe upon the right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy,” the majority writes, “if the State has a compelling interest and has narrowly tailored its actions to that interest.”
Is there a more compelling state interest than protecting the vulnerable and innocent from violence?
And they want actions narrowly tailored? The law in question did not even outlaw most abortions, but merely dismemberment abortions, which is how Dr. Herbert Hodes aborts babies in the fourth, fifth, and sixth months of pregnancy.
The foul irony is that Kansas’ constitution, drafted in 1859, represented a victory over slavers. Had Kansas been cursed in the 1860s with the court it has today, slave owners could have simply asserted that owning other humans was simply an exercise in self-determination and that controlling one’s slave was simply controlling one’s body. For both institutions rest on the same demonic lie: that some people are not people, that these are rightly considered means to ends, tools for the “self-determination” of others.
The opinion in the Hodes ruling is fitting in a sense. Such egregious reasoning is appropriate for such an evil decision protecting such a barbaric act.
Lawton Nuss, Marla Luckert, Carol Beier, Eric Rosen, Lee A. Johnson, and Daniel Biles formed the majority in this case. They deserve infamy. Their names deserve to be forever stained with this ruling, which ignored the will of the people and the laws of nature in favor of Hodes, who bristled at the infringement on his child-dismemberment business.
Roe one day will fall. So will Hodes. The judges who perverted the law and mangled language in order to condemn babies to dismemberment will bear the shame of this ruling for the rest of their lives, if not longer.
