Lifting the veil of Roe

From the B'ham News:

A former administrator of Summit Medical Center has been charged with three misdemeanors for her role in abortions at the clinic, Alabama Attorney General Troy King's office announced Friday.

Janet Onthank King, 58, of Birmingham faces two charges of knowingly or recklessly performing abortions as a non-physician and one charge of making false entries into required equipment sterilization reports. ...

The case that led to her arrest began with a May 17 emergency order of license suspension against Summit. The suspension resulted from an incident in which a patient went to Summit on Feb. 20 and received an ultrasound administered by a non-physician. She was told by a Summit staff member that she was six weeks pregnant, even though she was near full term. The same day, the clinic gave her a dose of Mifeprex (RU-486), an abortion-inducing drug, also without a physician administering it as required.

The patient had a "critical and dangerously high" blood pressure reading of 182/129, the suspension order said. On Feb. 26, the patient walked into the emergency room of a Birmingham hospital "with the head of a baby protruding" and delivered a "stillborn, macerated, six pound, four ounce baby."

The fact that at least one member of the Summit staff is being held personally accountable for her role in this tragic episode is all well and good. Still, its worth noting that no one has been charged for the real crime that was committed here: aborting a "viable" fetus in the very latest stage of its prenatal development. Nor is it likely that anyone will be charged with that self-evidently heinous act, thanks to the United States Supreme Court and its thirty-plus years of abortion jurisprudence. As National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru stated in a piece marking the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade:

The true radicalism of Roe is still not sufficiently appreciated. Many educated people believe that Roe legalized abortion only in the first trimester, allowing it to be restricted in the second and banned in the third. In fact, Doe v. Bolton, handed down the same day as Roe, took back those apparent concessions. Abortions had to be allowed at all stages of pregnancy whenever continued pregnancy was said to jeopardize a woman's "physical, emotional, psychological, [or] familial" health. ...

The truth is that Roe was a breathtaking power grab by the Supreme Court, allowing abortion at any stage of pregnancy, nullifying laws in all fifty states, and going far beyond anything contemplated by public opinion before or since.

Ponnuru elaborated further on that point here:

There's a widespread myth that Roe allowed abortion to be prohibited in the third trimester so long as an exception was made for maternal health. The companion case Doe v. Bolton takes away that apparent concession, since it says that "health" has to be defined to include, among other things, emotional and familial factors. Casey did not modify this essential holding of Roe. States may be able to regulate abortion in some ways — they can pass some kinds of parental notification laws, for example — but they cannot prohibit abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

Until Roe and Doe are overturned once and for all, tragedies like the one at Summit will continue to occur regularly and without remedy. Most of them will go unreported and unnoticed, concealed beneath a veil of deception woven from the threads of Roe v. Wade. Every now and then, we get a chance to peek underneath that veil, and the truth is revealed to anyone who cares to see. And what a horrible, ugly truth it is.