Abortion Doctors

Ruth "Darth Bader" Ginsburg complains in her dissent on upholding the PBA ban.

The Court's hostility to the right Roe and Casey secured is not concealed. Throughout, the opinion refers to obstetrician-gynecologists and surgeons who perform abortions not by the titles of their medical specialties, but by the pejorative label 'abortion doctor.' Ante, at 14, 24, 25, 31, 33.

Some such as Stuart Buck wondered "Just when?" NRO has had a discussion of this and Robert George responded to Jonah Goldberg.

Dear Jonah:

The irony is that the label "abortion doctor" was actually introduced by supporters of legal abortion and its public funding as a way of softening the image of physicians who engage in the rather grisly practice of deliberate feticide. They were traditionally known as abortionists, and that remains the accurate label. The truth is that persons performing what we ordinarily think of when we use the term "abortions" are not acting as doctors (i.e., healers) at all. Whether or not they hold a medical degree and license to practice medicine, the object of their action is not healing but killing. The (attempted) abortion is a success or a failure depending precisely on whether they transform a living human fetus into a corpse. Anything short of fetal death—-including live birth—-is a failed abortion.

Pregnancy as such is not a disease; and abortion as such is not a therapeutic treatment. Of course, sometimes pregnancy induces dangerous maternal health problems, and physicians (including physicians who are pro-life) sometimes take actions unavoidably causing fetal death in order to save women's lives or prevent serious irreparable damage to their health. A classic case is the removal of a cancerous, but gravid, uterus. These were traditionally described as "indirect abortions," to distinguish them from abortions in the straightforward sense, i.e., interventions whose precise objective is killing the fetus. (The issue can be, though it need not be, discussed in terms of the "doctrine of double effect.")

U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, a leading opponent of abortion who also happens to be an obstetrician, notes the relevant distinction and refers to cases in which he himself has performed procedures that unavoidably caused fetal death in order to save maternal life. Obviously, he doesn't regard himself as an abortionist or even an "abortion doctor." In the tragic cases to which he refers, he would have been pleased—not disappointed—if somehow the baby miraculously proved able to survive after being removed from its mother's body. When we use the term "abortionist" (or "abortion doctor"), we refer to someone who accomplishes what he sets out to accomplish precisely in causing the fetus's death. His job is turning a living human being in utero into a dead one, then extracting the body or its severed parts to prevent infection. If the baby somehow miraculously survived, he would not be pleased — he would not even be paid. And he would probably be sued.

Sincerely,
Robby

Abortion doctor isn't a pejorative, its an oxymoron.