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The Spectacle Blog
Reacting to Shannen Coffin’s article examining Elena Kagan’s role in drafting a politically important partial-birth abortion statement by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Yuval Levin writes:
What’s described in these memos is easily the most serious and flagrant violation of the boundary between scientific expertise and politics I have ever encountered. A White House official formulating a substantive policy position for a supposedly impartial physicians’ group, and a position at odds with what that group’s own policy committee had actually concluded? You have to wonder where all the defenders of science-those intrepid guardians of the freedom of inquiry who throughout the Bush years wailed about the supposed politicization of scientific research and expertise-are now. If the Bush White House (in which I served as a domestic policy staffer) had ever done anything even close to this it would have been declared a monumental scandal, and rightly so.
Apparently scientific integrity only matters as long as it doesn’t somehow infringe on abortion.
Given the memos Coffin provides in his article, it’s hard to see how Kagan could explain away her significant rewriting of the statement, which directly affected policy relating to partial-birth abortion. But maybe she can. A senator should give her the opportunity during the hearings.
View all comments (8) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Joseph Lawler
http://spectator.org/blog/2010/06/29/kagans-view-of-the-role-of-sci
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ncatty| 6.29.10 @ 6:08PM
Abortion is the sacrament of the Progressive/Liberal secular religion.
Nick| 6.29.10 @ 7:33PM
ncatty,
That is why I call them modern day Molech worshippers.
I also call them modern day vampires. They can't stand the sight of a Crucifix and they suck the blood out of society.
Eli | 6.30.10 @ 12:06PM
The two of you are being ridiculous. If one is not religious, and doesn't think there's anything wrong with killing a fetus because they don't consider it a meaningful life, then they are being entirely principled in supporting a woman's right to choose. It is perfectly congruent with leading a moral, compassionate and righteous life. So while your moral disagreement is perfectly legitimate, your narrative is false.
I think an illustrative example of this is the subject of animal rights. If you believe that animals are meaningful lives, in the sense that we ought not kill them for our own pleasure, then "murder" is being committed on a horrendous scale daily. But hunters and meat-eaters are not bad people - or even immoral. They simply have a different belief about the meaning of animal life - one that is perfectly reasonable within the bounds of modern attitudes. The "pro-choice" attitude among vegetarians would be that people ought to be allowed to make that determination for themselves, considering that the question of meaning and animal-rights, just like the question of meaning and fetuses, is reasonably debatable; There are very good reasons on both sides for making different, subjective decisions.
Nick| 6.30.10 @ 12:58PM
Eli,
"[...] considering that the question of meaning and animal-rights, just like the question of meaning and fetuses, is reasonably debatable; [sic]"
No, it is not.
"There are very good reasons on both sides for making different, subjective decisions."
Again, no, there are not.
It has nothing to with religion or theology, Eli. It is about science. All of us came into being at the moment of conception. We all went through the same changes in development.
Also, the nazis thought is was okay to kill people who they didn't think had "meaningful" lives. Were the nazis being "entirely principled," Eli?
The word "fetus" is Latin for "unborn baby," by the way.
Bob Miller| 6.30.10 @ 1:18PM
Kagan is to law as Gore is to science.
Kagan is to science as Gore is to marriage.