Splitting the Baby by Dinesh D’Souza for The Epoch Times
There’s a biblical story that tells about King Solomon being asked to adjudicate between two women both claiming to be the true mother of a child. Solomon declared that since there was no way to resolve the dispute, he would have the baby split in two, and each woman could then receive half. While one of the two women sullenly agreed to this solution, the real mother begged that the child’s life be spared and that she be given to the other woman.
In this way, Solomon knew the identity of the real mother. She was the one who could not, given a mother’s emotional attachment to her child, bear to see her child carved in two. Solomon punished the false claimant and gave the child to its actual mother. The story, intended to illustrate the wisdom of Solomon, introduced the idea of “splitting the baby” into the English vocabulary.
I bring this up because an important abortion case is coming before the Supreme Court in October, and I think it’s likely that the court will end up, metaphorically speaking of course, splitting the baby. In other words, I suspect the court will uphold the Mississippi law restricting abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy while at the same time leaving the landmark 1973 case of Roe v. Wade largely intact.
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I emphasize that this is not what I want the court to do. Rather, I prefer that the court follow the recommendation of the state of Mississippi and not merely uphold the abortion statute but also overturn Roe v. Wade and a whole series of cases that came alongside Roe or built upon Roe: Doe v. Bolton, and also Planned Parenthood v. Casey. These decisions expanded and fortified the original Roe decision. Thus, this article doesn’t lay out what I want to happen, but rather what I think is most likely to happen. Prophecy is very different from advocacy.
Why do I think the court will take a middle course and split the baby? Because the Supreme Court seems to have split into three factions. Commentators on the court typically divide the group into two, the three Democratic nominees who make up the liberal or left faction, and the six Republican nominees who make up the conservative or right faction.
But this division is too facile. The six right-leaning justices can be separated into two camps. There is a center-right faction made up of Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, and a solid-right faction made up of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch. Of course, Barrett was widely considered to be a strong pro-lifer prior to and during her confirmation hearings, but I’m not convinced she is a sure bet to overturn Roe v. Wade.
