When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it claimed to be removing the judiciary from the abortion debate. In reality, it simply gave the courts a macabre new task: deciding how far states can push a patient toward death before allowing her to undergo an emergency abortion.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit offered its own answer, declaring that Texas may prohibit hospitals from providing “stabilizing treatment” to pregnant patients by performing an abortion—withholding the procedure until their condition deteriorates to the point of grievous injury or near-certain death.
The ruling proves what we already know: Roe’s demise has transformed the judiciary into a kind of death panel that holds the power to elevate the potential life of a fetus over the actual life of a patient.
No, it’s not “both side bad” (and the implication there is that any time when someone says “both sides do this badly” is unhelpful, which I disagree with).
It’s “both sides are doing something similar here but that thing isn’t part of the reasoning or decision making of each side, and you’re treating it like it is.”
My original statement was an observation of the irony here, not a social commentary on what a “death panel” actually is. Whether the panels of death came about intentionally or not has nothing to do with the fact that they are creating what they were crying about years ago.