Emily Bazelon writes here, at Slate, about South Dakota's "unbelievable" abortion law which, among other things, "requires doctors to give patients who come for an abortion a written statement telling them that 'the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.'" "If you care about doctors' freedom of speech," she writes, "or their responsibility to give accurate information to patients, the South Dakota statute looks pretty alarming."
I'm not sure what to think about the free-speech objection. It seems to me that all kinds of reasonable, easily justifiable regulations of the practice of medicine are going to involve requiring doctors to communicate some information to patients and forbid them to say some things to patients. The free-speech objection, then, appears to piggy-back on the "accurate information" objection. So, is it, or is it not, the case that an abortion "terminate[s] the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being"? Well, the statute in question defines "human being" as "an individual living member of the species Homo sapiens, including the unborn human being during the entire embryonic and fetal ages from fertilization to full gestation." Bazelon thinks this is just cheating; is she right?
Here's the key paragraph of her piece:
But what's more distressing, because the majority's reasoning is so strained, is the assertion that by defining a phrase one way, a state can erase its ambiguity and the variety of perceptions people bring to it. It's one thing to say—as the case law the majority relies on here does—that a statutory definition binds judges and their interpretation of language. It's another entirely to say that when doctors tell women they are carrying a human being, that women will think, Oh, right, that means only the long, convoluted thing that the state says it does. Most patients won't think that, because they won't necessarily define "human being" the way the statute does. As Yale law professor Robert Post says in a 2007 article (PDF) in the University of Illinois Law Review, "If South Dakota were to enact a statute requiring physicians to inform abortion patients that they were destroying the 'soul' of their unborn progeny, and if it were explicitly to provide in the statute that 'soul' is defined as 'human DNA,' the evasion would be obvious." Instead, South Dakota has co-opted human being and attached its own meaning to it.
I was intrigued by the use of the word "co-opted." Did the legislature really "attach it's own meaning" -- some kind of strange, esoteric, secret-knowledge meaning? It strikes me that the objections to the statute reflect a worry that, by requiring doctors to remind women contemplating abortions that unborn children are "human beings", the law might make complicate the decision to end these human beings' lives.
World Youth Day 2008 is being held this summer in Sydney, Australia. According to the event's official web site, "[o]rganised by the Catholic Church, WYD brings together young people from around the globe to celebrate and learn about their faith on a more regular basis. WYD08 will be the largest event Australia has ever hosted. It will attract over 125,000 international visitors - more than the 2000 Olympics. WYD08 will mark the first visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Australia." (During the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, these events were huge, and quite formative, I'm told, for many young Catholics.)
Well, if you put on a big Catholic jamboree, with the Pope in attendance, in a free country, you are going to stir up conversation, debate, disagreement . . . and some protest (some of it, no doubt, malicious and offensive). And so, local authorities have enacted a new, temporary set of regulations that "will allow police to arrest and fine people for 'causing annoyance' to World Youth Day participants." In response, as this headline puts it, "Catholics are split on [the] freedom to annoy":
[The] prominent Catholic priest and lawyer Frank Brennan has condemned new police powers for World Youth Day as a "dreadful interference" with civil liberties and contrary to Catholic teaching on human rights.
Any thoughts? What free-speech rule or principle (if any) should control this situation, and others like it? I tend to be a free-speech libertarian, even though I'm uncomfortably aware that a lot of libertarian free-speech rhetoric rings hollow. Would those who object to the "don't annoy" rule object as strongly if the event in question were not World Youth Day but some other, perhaps more "progressive", group? Readers might want to check out this post, at the Commonweal blog (where I got the story) and also the comments.
The New York Times reports on a recent doctor-assisted suicide in Germany, by an elderly woman who was not ill:
Ms. Schardt, 79, a retired X-ray technician from the Bavarian city of Würzburg, was neither sick nor dying. She simply did not want to move into a nursing home, and rather than face that prospect, she asked Mr. Kusch, a prominent German campaigner for assisted suicide, for a way out.
Her last words, after swallowing a deadly cocktail of the antimalaria drug chloroquine and the sedative diazepam, were “auf Wiedersehen,” Mr. Kusch recounted at a news conference on Monday.
It was hardly the last word on her case, however. Ms. Schardt’s suicide — and Mr. Kusch’s energetic publicizing of it — have set off a national furor over the limits on the right to die, in a country that has struggled with this issue more than most because of the Nazi’s euthanizing of at least 100,000 mentally disabled and incurably ill people.
Not that the Times wants to be judgmental. After all . . .
While Ms. Schardt was not suffering from a life-threatening disease, or in acute pain, her life was hardly pleasant, Mr. Kusch said. She had trouble moving around her apartment, where she lived alone. Having never married, she had no family. She also had few friends, and rarely ventured out.
In such circumstances, a nursing home seemed likely to be the next stop. And for Ms. Schardt, who Mr. Kusch said feared strangers and had a low tolerance for those less clever than she was, that was an unbearable prospect.
You know, I joke sometimes that some "less clever" people's remarks make me "want to kill myself" . . . but, it's a joke.
Meanwhile, a push for "death with dignity" in Washington. Don't worry, though . . . Oregon's "safeguards work."
